Born in Sarzana, Italy, in 1968, a year of joyful subversion
throughout Western Europe, and the year of the Black Power protest at
the Mexico City olympics, Alessandra Giannini is old enough to recall
the car-free Sundays of the global oil crisis, and the cholera
epidemic in Naples of the early 1970s. She feels part of a European
generation by necessity attuned to environmental issues.
After completing a Physics degree from the University of Milan, in
1995 she moved to New York and Columbia University to pursue studies
in tropical climate dynamics, with the double intent of learning more
about the workings of the climate system, and, by focusing on tropical
climate, of learning how to do science that would be of potential use
to society.
Alessandra Giannini has researched the dynamics of the impact of the
El Nino-Southern Oscillation on tropical Atlantic variability, working
on two regions particularly vulnerable to climate variability and
change; the Brazilian Nordeste, and the islands of the Caribbean. The
focus of her research now is Sahel drought. A paper
that she co-authored and was published in Science in 2003 ,
conclusively attributed the persistence of drought in this region of
Africa in the 1970s and 1980s to a warming of
the global tropical oceans, challenging the widely held belief
that the local populations were to be held responsible for this
environmental disaster, hypothesized to have been brought about by
rapid population growth and the consequent mismanagement of natural
resources. (Read
more from SciDev.Net).
She continues to work on climate science, specifically on issues
related to African climate change, and to be extremely interested in
the policy implications of scientific findings, and in the role of
science and scientists in our global society.
Alessandra Giannini
2006-12-02