Di Baldassarre studied environmental engineering with a focus on water resources at University of Bologna where he graduated summa cum laude in 2002.[4] After his PhD in hydrology in 2006, he continued his scientific career by doing a postdoc at the University of Bristol.[4]
Research and career
Di Baldassarre joined the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft as a Senior Lecturer in 2009.[1] He was awarded the EGU Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award (2012) and the AGU Early Career Hydrologic Science Award (2012) for his work on flood risk.[4] He was also the project coordinator of the European Commission FP7 funded project KULTURisk – A knowledge-based approach to develop a culture of risk prevention in Europe (2011-2014).[5]
Di Baldassarre joined Uppsala University in 2014, where he today is a professor of hydrology.[1] He leads the ERC Consolidator Grant project, HydroSocialExtremes, which addresses the interplay between hydrological extremes and society.[6] He is also the Director of the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science, which focuses on natural hazards, social vulnerability and societal security.[7] He was the appointed Chair of Panta Rhei: Change in Hydrology and Society during 2017–2019, a global decadal initiative of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS).[8] Di Baldassarre is also a dedicated educator. He has mentored 10 postdocs and supervised over 15 PhD students and more than 60 MSc students at UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft and Uppsala University.[4]
Through his research, Di Baldassarre has contributed to our understanding of the complex feedbacks between hydrological extremes and society, where, among many things, his development of socio-hydrological models on the dynamic two-way feedbacks between hydrological extremes (droughts and floods) and society have provided key process insights into the concepts of adaptation, levee effects and legacy. In 2020, he was ranked amongst top 2% of scientists in the world for career-long citation impact according to new citation ranking developed by Stanford University and published in the journal PLoS Biology.[9]
Di Baldassarre's most cited research has been on socio-hydrology, flood risk, natural hazards, and coupled human-nature systems. Here is a selection of some of his most highly cited works:
Di Baldassarre G, A Montanari (2009), Uncertainty in river discharge observations: a quantitative analysis, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 13 (6), 913–921. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-13-913-2009
Di Baldassarre G, A Viglione, G Carr, L Kuil, JL Salinas, G Blöschl (2013), Socio-hydrology: conceptualising human-flood interactions, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 17 (8), 3295–3303. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-17-3295-2013
Di Baldassarre, G., Sivapalan, M., Rusca, M., et al. (2019). Sociohydrology: Scientific challenges in addressing the sustainable development goals. Water Resources Research, 55, 6327–6355. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR023901
Di Baldassarre, G., Nohrstedt, D., Mård, J., et al. (2018). An Integrative Research Framework to Unravel the Interplay of Natural Hazards and Vulnerabilities, Earth's Future, 6, 305–310. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017EF000764
Mård, J., Di Baldassarre, G., Mazzoleni, M. (2018) Nighttime light data reveal how flood protection shapes human proximity to rivers. Science Advances, 4(8), eaar5779. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aar5779
Di Baldassarre, G., Wanders, N., AghaKouchak, A., Kuil, L., Rangecroft, S., Veldkamp, T.I.E., Garcia, M., van Oel, P.R., Breinl, K., and Van Loon A.F. (2018). Water shortages worsened by reservoir effects. Nature Sustainability, 1, 617–622. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0159-0
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