WE WELCOME PROF. ROBERTO BUIZZA AS AN AFFILIATE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF EXCELLENCE
Prof. Roberto Buizza has become an official affiliate of EMbeDS in March 2020.
Roberto Buizza has a degree in Physics from the University of Milano, with a thesis on plasma fusion, and a PhD in Mathematics from University College London, with a thesis on perturbation growth and instabilities in the atmosphere. He also has a Master in Business Administration from London Business School, with a Management Report on using Monte Carlo techniques to estimate risk.
After 4 years as a scientists at the ‘Centro di Ricerca Termica e Nucleare’ of the Electricity Board of Italy (CRTN/ENEL, Milano), in 1991 he joined the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), where he had been a key developer of the ECMWF ensembles, and served as Head of the Predictability Division and Lead Scientist. He contributed to develop and implement, in 1992, the ECMWF ensemble prediction system, which provides the most reliable and skilful medium-range and monthly probabilistic predictions in the world. These include hurricane strikes probabilities, and the probability of extreme events such as heat-wave and flooding events. During the years spent at ECMWF, he worked on many different aspects of Earth-system modelling, data assimilating and predictability. He was involved in several European projects, and acted as coordinator of the European Union FP7 project ER-CLIM2, which led to the production of the first coupled (ocean currents and waves, sea-ice and cryosphere, land and atmosphere) reanalyses of the 20th century. The 10-member ensemble of reanalyses, which cover the period 1900-2010, is a key data source to investigate and understand the Earth climate evolution.
In November 2018, he left ECMWF and joined ‘Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna’ of Pisa, as Full Professor in Physics. Since then, he has been working to establish a new initiative on climate with the support of the three Scuole Universitarie Federate: the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, and the Scuola Superiore IUSS of Pavia. Since January 2020, he is the coordinator of the new Center for Climate Change studies and Sustainable Actions (3CSA), established by the Scuole Universitarie Federate.
He is an expert in numerical weather prediction, ensemble methods and predictability, and has more than 200 publications, of which 100+ in the peer-reviewed literature. He contributed to several books, and has been serving on Scientific Advisory Boards of institutions in Australia, India, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Since joining Sant’Anna, he has been very active on communicating climate science to the public, and on initiatives aiming to promote immediate and impactful actions to deal with climate change.
He is a committed team player with a strong multidisciplinary educational background, teaching experience, effective communication skills and a strong publication record. Integrity, passion for work and intellectual curiosity, and genuine interest in teaching and mentoring are also key traits of my personality.
In 2002, he was awarded the Buchan prize by the Royal Meteorological Society, United Kingdom, for outstanding scientific contributions in the field of probabilistic numerical weather prediction.
In May 2020, he delivered the ‘Bert Bolin Lecture on Climate Change’, at Stockholm University, on “Climate Change: how can we motivate transformation?” (The Bert Bolin Lecture on Climate Research is given annually to commemorate professor Bert Bolin and his pioneering work for climate research at Stockholm University and internationally. The speaker is selected among prominent scientists within climate research by the Faculty of Science; from the Bert Bolin Centre).
