Andrea Rinaldo

Andrea Rinaldo has been Director of the Laboratory of ecohydrology between 2008 and 2024 and is now a Professor Emeritus, Honorary Professor at ENAC, EPFL.

Biographical sketch

Andrea Rinaldo (born in Venice on September 13, 1954) is a Professor Emeritus, Honorary Professor at the School of of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), EPFL. He is the former Professor of Hydrology and Water Resources and Director of the Laboratory of Ecohydrology.

Awards

Throughout its scientific career, Prof. Rinaldo has been the recipient of many international awards and distinctions:

  • Munson Award, Purdue University (1982)
  • Gatto Award, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome (1984)
  • Hydrological Sciences Award, American Geophysical Union (1999)
  • Fellow, American Geophysical Union (2000)
  • Dalton Medal, European Geosciences Union (2005)
  • ERC Advanced Grant Fellowship (2008)
  • Borland & Hydrology Days Award, Colorado State University (2010)
  • 4th Prince Sultan Abdulaziz International Water Prize, Riyadh (2010)
  • Luigi Tartufari International Prize, Geosciences, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome (2014)
  • Distinguished Scholar Medal, Am. Soc. Agricultural & Biological Engineering, New Orleans (2015)
  • Faculty Fellow, Hagler Institute for Advanced Studies, Texas A&M University, (2018-2022)
  • Inaugural Neil Armstrong Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Purdue University, (2019-2021)
  • Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award, Purdue University (2021)
  • Premio Masi (International Prize), Verona, 2023
  • Horton Medal, American Geophysical Union (2023)
  • The Stockholm Water Prize (2023)

Academy Memberships (excerpts)

  • Fellow, Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Venice (1995) (IVSLA Board, 2007-), President (2021-)
  • Fellow, Accademia Galileiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Padova (1999)
  • Fellow, Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze (detta dei XL), Rome (2014) (XL Board, 2017-2020)
  • Fellow, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome (2019)
  • Foreign Member, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm (2006)
  • Foreign Member, US National Academy of Engineering, Washington (2006)
  • Foreign Member, US National Academy of Sciences, Washington (2012)
  • Foreign Associate, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge (2018)

Research interests

Andrea Rinaldo’s research drew together an integrated ecohydrological framework, which blends laboratory, field, and theoretical evidence focused on hydrologic controls on biota, and has contributed substantially to our understanding of the function of river networks as ecological corridors. This function is relevant to a number of key ecological processes that control the spatial ecology of species and biodiversity in the river basin, the population dynamics and biological invasions along waterways, and the spread of waterborne disease. As examples, one counts metapopulation persistence in fluvial ecosystems, metacommunity predictions of fish diversity patterns in large river basins, geomorphic controls imposed by the fluvial landscape on elevational gradients of species’ richness, zebra mussel invasions of iconic river networks, and the spread of proliferative kidney disease in salmonid fish; or of devastating chronic (schistosomiasis) or epidemic (cholera) infections in human communities. A well-known theoretical contribution by Andrea Rinaldo is that ecological processes in the fluvial landscape are so constrained by hydrology and by the matrix for ecological interactions (the directional dispersal embedded in fluvial and host/pathogen mobility networks), that predictability by spatially-explicit approaches is warranted. Accounting for these drivers required spatial descriptions that have now produced a broad range of results illustrating the predictive power of the methods and the coherent conceptual framework that produced them. Hard-gained experimental and field work supported the theoretical idea. In the process, Andrea Rinaldo was one of the main contributors to establishing Ecohydrology as a mainstream science. The overarching theme of Andrea Rinaldo’s work is the investigation on how the physical structure of the hydrologic environments affects biodiversity, species invasions, and waterborne disease spread by embedding the relevant ecology into the core geoscience of river networks. The relation between the geosciences (the study of the form fluvial ecosystems) is explored from the perspective of ecosystems produced by fluvial processes and forms. In the case of the ecosystem services provided by the river basin, Andrea Rinaldo’s work showed that time is ripe for retooling our decision-making basis. Andrea Rinaldo’s work has changed how we understand the interface between the hydrosphere and the biosphere.  Related tools developed in his ECHO Lab also significantly contributed to COVID-19 research (see e.g. publication 8). This happened serendipitously, owing to the expertise developed on spatially-explicit mathematical models of infectious disease spread (in particular epidemic cholera and endemic schistosomiasis, publication 6), acquired in the study of waterborne and water-based disease studies which is central to Ecohydrology.

Publications

Author of four monographs and (to date) more than 350 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, more than 26,900 citations with h-index 105 as of September 2024 and i10-index 247 (h-index 61 and i10-index 209 since 2017) [1]. Andrea Rinaldo has authored, with Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, the research monograph Fractal River basins. Chance and Self-Organization (published in its 2nd edition by Cambridge University Press in 2001, publication 1 below), considered the standard reference of its field [2]. The recently published book River networks as ecological corridors. Species, populations, pathogens, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020 (publication 6 below, coauthored with M. Gatto and I. Rodriguez-Iturbe) is a coherent follow-up that capitalizes on the insight gained on nature’s making of rivers as substrates for ecological interactions. The underlying research has been carried out mostly in his ECHO Lab at EPFL in the past 15 years. The book won the PROSE Award for the Environmental Science category for books appeared in 2020 by the Association of American Publishers (2021). Overall, he authored 51 papers published in three primary general science journals (Nature, Science and PNAS). Among recognitions [3], his election to the US National Academy of Sciences in the class of Environmental Sciences and Ecology (Section 63) is the most coveted.

[1] Source Google Scholar ( http://scholar.google.ch/citations?user=27F9Y3cAAAAJ&hl=it&oi=ao ). Statistics (as of Sept 13, 2022) are: 332 journal papers, 26808 citations, h-index=100, ­­i10 = 247, average citations per item=37.2

[2] see http://psipw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=389&Itemid=225&lang=en

[3] A summary of AR’s achievements is in P. Gabrielsen, A profile of Andrea Rinaldo, PNAS, 111, 3900, 2014.

Significant publications

  1. Rodriguez-Iturbe, I. and A. Rinaldo, Fractal River Basins. Chance and Self-Organization, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2001 (2148 citations)
  2. Banavar, J.R., A. Maritan, A. Rinaldo, Size and form in efficient transportation networks, Nature, 399, 130-133, 1999 (896 citations)
  3. Rinaldo A, W.E. Dietrich, R. Rigon, G.K. Vogel, I. Rodriguez-Iturbe, Geomorphological signatures of varying climate, Nature, 374 (6523), 632-635, 1995 (181 citations, Nature cover)
  4. Rinaldo, A., I. Rodriguez-Iturbe, R. Rigon, E. Ijjasz-Vasquez, R.L. Bras, Self-organized fractal river networks, Physical Review Letters, 70(6), 822-825, 1993 (339 citations)
  5. Rinaldo, A., A. Marani, R. Rigon, Geomorphological Dispersion, Water Resources Research, 27(4), 513-525, 1991 (389 citations)
  6. Rinaldo, A., M. Gatto, I. Rodriguez-Iturbe, River networks as ecological corridors. Species, populations, pathogens, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2020 (PROSE Award for the Environmental Science category from the Association of American Publishers 2021)
  7. Carrara, F., F. Altermatt, I. Rodriguez-Iturbe, A. Rinaldo, Dendritic connectivity controls biodiversity patterns in experimental mtacommunities, Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, 109, 5761-5766, 2012 (286 citations)
  8. Gatto, M., E. Bertuzzo, L. Carraro, L. Mari, S. Miccoli, R. Casagrandi, A. Rinaldo, Spread and dynamics of the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy: effects of emergency containment measures, Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, 117(19), 10484-10491, 2020 (901 citations, WoS and Scopus Highly Cited Paper)
  9. Muneepeerakul, R., E. Bertuzzo, H.J. Lynch, W.F. Fagan, A. Rinaldo, I. Rodriguez-Iturbe, Neutral metacommunity model predicts fish diversity patterns in Mississippi-Missouri river basin, Nature, 453, 220-229, 2008 (378 citations)
  10. Banavar, J.R., J. Damuth, A., Maritan, A. Rinaldo, Supply-demand balance and metabolic scaling, Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, 99, 10506-10509, 2002 (259 citations)

Mentoring

Andrea Rinaldo supervised and mentored more than 70 MS students, 41 Ph.D. students, and 16 postdocs. Among former doctoral students and postdocs holding Faculty positions: A Bellin (Trento); P Salandin (Padova), V Fiorotto (U Trieste), M Marani (Duke, Padova), R Rigon (Trento), P D’Odorico (UC Berkeley), A Fiori (Roma 3), A Giacometti (Cà Foscari Venice), M Pannone (Basilicata), S Fagherazzi (Boston U), L Mari (Milan Polytechnic), G Botter (Padova), A D’Alpaos (Padova), E Bertuzzo (Cà Foscari Venice), S Suweis (Padova), A Giometto (Cornell U), B. Schäfli (U Bern), L Carraro (U Zurich), P Benettin (UNIL).

Laboratory of Ecohydrology

Field, laboratory and theoretical work in the general field of water controls on biota is carried out at Rinaldo’s Laboratory of Ecohydrology (known as the ECHO Lab), established in 2008 at EPFL, built around a single-recipient 5-year ERC Advanced Grant (2009). Experimental work in the wet Lab at EPFL has been ongoing for more than 10 years now, and has had a high impact on the field of water borne diseases (see e.g. publication 7 above). Rinaldo’s Lab also carried out directly a significant amount of field work in Haiti, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, and in various catchments in Switzerland.