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Research Group

Members

CaminadeCyril 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).

CasallasAlejandro 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.

GiovanniGiovanni 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

AddisuAddisu 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.

felipeFelipe 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

GulilatGulilat 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.


felipeRita 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.


lucaLuca 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.


RBRiccardo 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 LoweRachel 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 LiSanai 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 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

VolkerVolker 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 GiuseppeFrancesca 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.




Thunderstorm over Venice

NEW AGGREGATION NUMBER

predicts convective clustering onset in a simplified model of radiative-convection equilibrium! Be the first to read all about it in this new article submitted to JAMES (click).

Climate Unboxed


My new hobby in my free time is to upload videos on various topics related to weather and climate on my new YouTube channel climate unboxed. At the moment there are only my initial videos on climate data processing that I am developing for a new joint EDX course with the UNESCO regional office in Zimbabwe, but I hope to supplement these with more general interest material over the coming year. Don't forget to subscribe for news on new uploads.

Google Scholar Page

ORCID iD iconorcid.org/0000-0003-0975-6691

Page compiled 03-02-2023