Paola Malanotte Rizzoli

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.[1] However, math prevailed and she earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Lyceum “Benedetti” Italy.[2] 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”.[2] She spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow in Padua and then joined a study initiated by the Italian National Research Council to look at the issues surrounding Venice and the surrounding lagoon.[3] Starting in 1971 she traveled between Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Venice working on oceanographic studies of Venice.[3] Starting in 1972, she was also a research associate at Istituto Studio Dinamica Grande Masse (Institute for the Study of Great Masses), where she received tenure in 1976 and remained until 1981. In 1978 she completed a second Ph.D. at Scripps Institution of Oceanography with a dissertation titled “Solitary Rossby Waves Over Variable Relief and Their Stability Properties”.[4][5][6] At the time, she was the only woman in the physical oceanography department.[7] 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),[8] and again was the only woman in physical oceanography.[7] In 1987, Malanotte Rizzoli became the first woman in MIT's Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences department to earn tenure.[8] In 1994, Malanotte Rizzoli was one of 16 women faculty in the School of Science at MIT who drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) Robert Birgeneau, which started a campaign to highlight and challenge gender discrimination at MIT.[9]

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.[7]

Malanotte Rizzoli has worked in multiple research topics, which she describes as her “renewal time” of 5–7 years.[7] In 1982 she started a program focusing on the physical oceanography of the eastern Mediterranean, the POEM project, where she led research into the circulation of water in the region.[10] As increasing amounts of data become available for oceanographic research, she has expanded her use of data assimilation,[11] with a focus on its applications to oceanographic questions.[12][13] Geographically, she has considered the formation of the rings of the Gulf Stream In the Atlantic Ocean[14][15] and she has also worked on the exchange of heat, water, and salt in tropical oceans.[16] 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.[17] 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.[18]

Climate science, with its daunting complexity, is arguably the greatest challenge presently facing not only oceanography but the earth sciences in general

— Paola Malanotte Rizzoli, [7]

Malanotte Rizzoli grew up in Venice and remembers the 1966 Venice flood[19] and in 2017 she considered how her connections to Venice influenced her career arc.[7] The storm surge in Venice, the Acqua alta, has been the focus of her work and from 1995 until 2013, she was a consultant for Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the group tasked with the building the barriers designed to block the flow of water into the Venetian lagoon, the MOdulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (MOSE) project.[20][7][21] In 2021, Malanotte-Rizzoli created an exhibit on the resilience of Venice with Laura Fregolent for the 17th International Venice Biennale of Architecture.[22][23]

• Masi Prize, Masi Foundation (1998)[24]
• Fellow, American Meteorological Society (2002)[25]
• Fellow, American Geophysical Union (2006)[26]
• Rachel Carson lecture, American Geophysical Union (2017)[27]
• Enrico Marchi lecture, University of Catania (2018)[28]

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.[8]

• Paola Malanotte Rizzoli publications indexed by Google Scholar
• Biennale Architettura 2021 - Sneak Peek: Laura Fregolent; Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli on YouTube, April 2, 2021