Research Group
Members
Cyril Caminade
Cyril is originally trained as an applied physicist & climatologist. He obtained his PhD about climate variability in Sub-Saharan Africa at CERFACS and at the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse in 2006. In early 2008, he moved to the University of Liverpool to study the impact of climate change on the risk posed by important vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue, Zika, Rift Valley Fever, plague, bluetongue, fascioliasis and haemonchosis. His work has been cited by important governmental agencies (IPCC, PHE, World Bank…) and by mainstream media at global scale.
Cyril is originally trained as a climate research scientist, and he lately specialized on climate change impacts on health.
He has expertise in Tropical and African climate variability.
Over the years, he has worked on several multi-disciplinary research projects focusing on the impact of climate
on invasive insect species and vector-borne diseases affecting human and animal health (ticks, Asian tiger mosquito, malaria, Rift Valley Fever, Zika, dengue, plague, bluetongue, fasciolosis and haemonchosis).
Alejandro Casallas
Alejandro Casallas is studying for his PhD in a project concerned with
understanding the role of cloud microphysics parameterizations and
ocean-land surfaces in the development of convective self-aggregation in
RCE simulations. He obtained a Master's degree in Meteorology from the
National University of Colombia with a thesis about the Understanding of
convective storms in a tropical, high-altitude location with in-situ
meteorological observations and GPS-derived water vapor. While doing his
Master's he worked as a researcher in Sergio Arboleda University in
which he serve as a lecturer and also work in the development and use of
Machine Learning and Physical models to represent the behavior of
meteorological variables and air quality pollutants.
Giovanni Biagioli
Giovanni Biagioli is an Atmospheric Physics PhD student of the
University of Trieste, based at ICTP. He will works on a
project concerning the role of deep convection clustering and how it
may impact our assessment of climate
sensitivity. He obtained a Master's Degree in
Mathematics at the University of Florence with a thesis on
mathematical modeling and numerical simulation of phreatic eruptions.
Then he worked at the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and
Volcanology as a research fellow, dealing with environmental fluid
dynamics and the development of automatic procedures for predictive
models in active volcanic areas.
Ex Members
Addisu Gezahegn
Addisu Gezahegn is studied his PhD on the subject of
self-organization of tropical convection.
Working with the WRF model set up for idealized situations
of radiative-convective equilibrium, understanding how radiation, coldpool
dynamics, and water vapour and cloud structures interact
to produce organised states. He was then a post-doc
researcher working with Sandrine Bony at LMD in Paris
before recently moving back to the University of Addis
Ababa as a lecturer.
Felipe Colon Gonzalez obtained his PhD
at UEA working on statistical models for
dengue tranmission. He worked on large and
complicated datasets for malaria transmission
in Rwanda and Uganda, to which he applied
statistical modelling techniques to identify
in particular the role of socio economic
factors in transmission, and used the datasets
to evaluate seasonal forecasts of malaria
using the dynamical ECMWF/ICTP IFS-VECTRI malaria
prediction system. He then worked at the
University of East Anglia on issues of climate
and health before moving to the LSHTM
Gulilat Tefera Diro
works in regional climate modelling and climate model
development and has conducted some of the first attempts
to use a regional model in a seasonal forecasting
context. He is now based at CNRCWP in Canada.
Rita Nogherotto
Rita Nogherotto studied her PhD on the subject of cloud
physics. Starting from the recently implemented numerical
framework implemented in the ECMWF IFS by Tompkins and Forbes,
she has developed a new prognostic 5 phase microphysics scheme
for the REGCM code.
Luca
Caporaso Luca Caporaso has a background in boundary
layer processes. His research activity improved the
representation of land cover and land use change in Global
Climate Models, using MODIS data to evaluate the high
resolution deforestation model FOREST-SAGE. He then moved
to work
on a EU H2020 project on land use change with CNR in Italy.
Riccardo Biondi is
an expert on remote sensing. He has contributed to work on
land use change and malaria transmission in Africa while
at ICTP. Riccardo is
presently a Marie Curie Fellow at the university of Graz
in Austria.
Rachel Lowe was a Visiting Scientist at ICTP for a period of 16
months before moving to IC3 to return to her work on dengue transmission
in the Americas and applications of climate in health. She continues to collaborate
with ICTP and has directed a number of ICTP schools/workshops on
climate and health. She now works at the LSHTM.
Sanai Li (IC3)
Sanai Li was a visiting scientist at ICTP for a period of
3 years working on wheat yield simulation in China. She
is currently working at the APEC climate centre (APCC) in
Korea on the subject of crop yield prediction.
Ernest Asare (KNUST,
Ghana) - A STEP student from Ghana who is
conducted his PhD at KNUST under my
co-supervision, with the aim of improving the
understanding of the role of
surface hydrology in malaria transmission in
Ghana, with the ultimate goal to incorporate
some of this work as improvements in the VECTRI
malaria model. The PhD resulted in 3
peer-reviewed articles.
Collaborators
Volker Ermert (Cologne, Germany) is an expert on the Liverpool Malaria Model (LMM) which he used for his PhD work. Volker visited ICTP for a month in 2011 to advise on the parametrization choices to be implementated in VECTRI for the temperature sensitivities. His extensive knowledge of the malaria literature hugely accelerated the model development process, and Volker is the co-author on the first VECTRI manuscript.
Francesca
di Giuseppe (ECMWF, UK) has a background in modelling
radiation interaction within clouds, and has coauthored a
number of papers with Adrian Tompkins on this subject. She is
now working at ECMWF on the QWeCI project where a new EOF-based
spatial bias correction was designed to allow the monthly and
seasonal forecast systems to be joined seamlessly. She is now
working with ICTP to set up a pilot malaria forecasting system that uses these
forecasts to drive VECTRI, which will be tested over Malawi,
Uganda and Rwanda with ministry of health partners from the
QWeCI and HEALTHY FUTURES projects.
orcid.org/0000-0003-0975-6691