Paola Malanotte Rizzoli

Paola Malanotte Rizzoli is an Italian physical oceanographer known for her research on ocean circulation and sea level rise, especially with respect to flooding conditions in Venice.

Education and career As a child growing up in Venice, Malanotte Rizzoli had a passion for music and by age eleven learned La Traviata while considering a future as an opera singer. However, math prevailed and she earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Lyceum “Benedetti” Italy. In 1968 she completed a Ph.D. at the University of Padua with a dissertation titled “Quantum-mechanical structure of biologically important molecules. Investigation of the complex molecules of nucleic acids”. Starting in 1971 she traveled between Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Venice working on oceanographic studies of Venice. At the time, she was the only woman in the physical oceanography department. She remained at Scripps as a Cecil and Ida Green scholar from 1978 until 1980 at which point she moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),

From 1997 until 2009, Malanotte Rizzoli led the MIT component of the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, and has been the main advisor for 22 students in the program. As increasing amounts of data become available for oceanographic research, she has expanded her use of data assimilation, with a focus on its applications to oceanographic questions. Geographically, she has considered the formation of the rings of the Gulf Stream In the Atlantic Ocean and she has also worked on the exchange of heat, water, and salt in tropical oceans. In the early 2000s, Malanotte Rizzoli began work on climate science through a project that led to the development of a coupled ocean-atmosphere model in Southeast Asia where the Indonesian Throughflow allows passage of water from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. She was one of the contributing authors on the 2007 chapter on "Observations: Oceanic Climate Change and Sea Level" which was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate science, with its daunting complexity, is arguably the greatest challenge presently facing not only oceanography but the earth sciences in general|author=Paola Malanotte Rizzoli|source= and in 2017 she considered how her connections to Venice influenced her career arc. In 2021, Malanotte-Rizzoli created an exhibit on the resilience of Venice with Laura Fregolent for the 17th International Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Selected publications

Awards and honors

Masi Prize, Masi Foundation (1998) Fellow, American Meteorological Society (2002) Fellow, American Geophysical Union (2006) Rachel Carson lecture, American Geophysical Union (2017) Enrico Marchi lecture, University of Catania (2018)

Personal life Malanotte-Rizzoli is married to Peter Stone who is also a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2021 they endowed the Peter H. Stone and Paola Malanotte Stone chair whose first recipient is Arlene Fiore.