Andrea Rinaldo, professor of Hydraulic Engineering at the University of Padua and director of the Laboratory of Ecohydrology at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Epfl), is the first Italian scholar to be awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, the world's most prestigious prize for water studies, equivalent to a "Nobel" for water. Rinaldo is from Venice, born in 1954. He has been Visiting Professor, Princeton University (2004-2006), Visiting Professor and Research Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (1992-2002), a Hagler Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Texas A&M University since 2019, and Neal E. Armstrong Distinguished Visiting Professor at Purdue University. Since 1991, the Stockholm Water Prize has been awarded to individuals and organizations for extraordinary water-related achievements by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Academy. Prof. Andrea Rinaldo's research has contributed substantially to the understanding of the dynamic origin of form and function of river networks. Thanks to the Veneto professor's studies we now also know more about the spread and demography of waterborne diseases, such as epidemic cholera. Rinaldo demonstrated that the dominant ecological processes in the riverine landscape are strongly constrained by hydrology and made a fundamental contribution to the emergence and establishment of Ecohydrology as an autonomous science.
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