Profile of Andrea Rinaldo

By 1985, Andrea Rinaldo was losing interest in fluid mechanics. The newly appointed full professor of hydrodynamics at Italy’s University of Trento had excelled in studying the intricacies of eddies, vortices, and fluid flow through porous media. But Rinaldo, lacking excitement, yearned for new avenues of research, seeking, he says, his road to Damascus. Andrea Rinaldo at EPFL. Photo courtesy of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Trajectories of individual Tetrahymena sp. protists, tracked in Rinaldo’s Laboratory of Ecohydrology at EPFL. Such studies of mesoscopic-scale movement and reproduction support theoretical work on directional dispersal in networked environments (13). Image courtesy of Andrea Giometto. As part of his quest, Rinaldo attended a lecture at the University of Genoa, on the Mediterranean coast, a short drive from Trento’s mountain campus. The lecture, by Venezuelan hydrologist Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, caught Rinaldo’s attention with its intriguing title: “Chaos in Rainfall.” At the time, Rinaldo’s experience with hydrology consisted of one unremarkable undergraduate class, but the idea of applying the complex nonlinearity of chaos to something as basic as rainfall sparked his interest. Rodriguez-Iturbe’s lecture provided the excitement, novel research opportunities, and complexity in simple natural phenomena that Rinaldo sought. In the 28 years that have followed, Rinaldo and Rodriguez-Iturbe, both members of the National Academy of Sciences, have joined together to investigate how water moves through and influences landscapes and populations. Rinaldo’s work has focused on the fractal nature of river networks and the water-borne vectors of cholera. His foray into hydrology, commenced at that fortuitous lecture in 1985, has become a life-long journey. Rinaldo was born in 1954 in Venice, Italy. In November 1966, when Rinaldo was 12, a storm surge from the Adriatic Sea, heavy rainfall in the mountains, and an unusually high tide together submerged Venice under six feet of water. Inspired …