Spotlight on Young Researchers: Anna Scaini

 

Anna Scaini’s appetite for becoming a researcher was stirred at University, stemming from a desire to ‘save’ the last natural river in Europe, which runs close to her home town and causes dangerous local flooding. The Italian national is taking the first step towards pursuing her goal as she prepares to complete her PhD thesis in Hydrology at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST).

The braided Tagliamento river flows freely from the Alps to the Adriatic sea, stretching over a length of 178km. It is one of a kind, in that its morphological units are intact (complexity is intact), like it was for most of the European rivers before human intervention. The river’s ecosystem is in danger from local government plans to instate large flood retention basins. Anna Scaini became a scientist to help save the river and explains:

“Being a researcher allows me to gain the technical knowledge required to have a critical and objective view on the problem, a necessary first step to pursue my dream.”

Investigating water paths

Anna Scaini research domain is hydrology, but what researching rivers look like in practice? Anna’s PhD project is part of an FNR CORE project – Anna explains what it’s about:

“My research tries to quantify the importance of water flowing below the soil surface until reaching a stream located in a forested catchment in Luxembourg.”

“To do this, I am studying a ‘slice’ of the stream, combining artificial irrigation experiments with a hillslope model, meant to reproduce and understand the data collected in the field.”

“I am investigating which path water is taking before reaching the stream, and how combined water and tracer information can be used to understand discharge dynamics. The site is characterized by slate bedrock, which means that water can infiltrate through fractures up to an unknown and variable depth where the fractures close up.”

“These kinds of structures make it difficult to predict water movement below the soil surface, and that is what we try to do with my research.”

“The most interesting and anecdotic parts of my project are all linked to the experiments in the field. Find here an example of it! We used uranine, a fluorescent tracer, to trace water through its journey in the soil during the artificial sprinkling experiments. This picture shows the spectacular green colour of the uranine solution used for the irrigation.” – Anna

Anna has completed the field work for her PhD and is currently in the process of physically writing her thesis, meaning her daily routine is currently not quite as exciting as investigating rivers:

“I press the snooze button a few times before managing to get out of bed, check emails and news, get ready quickly and go to work in LIST, at the Belvaux site. I need to read a lot of articles, prepare and fix some figures, use some Matlab scripts, all of that with the aim of writing up the last chapters for my thesis.”

“Conditions are great here in Luxembourg”

Luxembourg naturally has a high concentration of researchers from other countries, but how did Anna end up in Luxembourg of all places?

“I chose Luxembourg amongst other options because I felt I was considered an employee first. The drawback when I started was that the University environment was somehow far from the cultural point of view, but during the years things have improved noticeably and today the situation is better than ever.”

She adds: “Conditions are great here in Luxembourg: too often young researchers are considered cheap and student-like labour. I immediately liked the higher role we can have here, I find it fair.”

Impacting society as much as science

Anna’s PhD project will help her gain the know-how needed to help tackle the issues facing the Tagliamento river, and give her the ability to view the issues both critically and objectively. This is not the only area where Anna wants to make an impact during her career, she explains that she would like to help push forward the domain of hydrology:

“I would like to work on something important, on a problem that if solved, would make a difference, pushing forward not only science but also society. Hydrology is a relatively young but very interdisciplinary science, and there are still many unknowns and gaps to fill. I hope I can actively work on that.”


More about the project

CORE Project ‘Eco-hydrological couplings for investigating stream flow generation processes’ – ECSTREAM (C12/SR/40/8854) – PI: Laurent Pfister, LIST

Publication related to this project: Scaini, A., Audebert, M., Hissler, C., Fenicia, F., Gourdol, L., Pfister, L., John Beven, K., 2017. Velocity and celerity dynamics at plot scale inferred from artificial tracing experiments and time-lapse ERT. J. Hydrol. 546, 28–43. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.12.035

Published 30 March 2017

Anna Scaini

In 2015, Anna won the AGU (American Geophysical Union) student video contest, which enabled her to attend the AGU Fall Meeting in the US, the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world.

SEE ALSO..

RELATED PROGRAMMES

About Spotlight on Young Researchers

Spotlight on Young Researchers is an FNR initiative to highlight early career researchers across the world who have a connection to Luxembourg. This article is the fourth in a series of around 20 articles, which will be published on a weekly basis. You can see more articles below as and when they are published.

Spotlight on Young Researchers: Paul Johanns

Paul Johanns works in a research field one does not read about every day: knots. As part of his AFR PhD at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Luxembourg national combines high-precision model experiments, computation and theory to untangle the influence of topology on the mechanics of complex knots, particularly those used in surgical procedures.

Spotlight on Young Researchers: A gas sensor powered by natural light

Many of the things we furnish our homes and office with emit gases that we are oblivious to inhaling. As eliminating these items from our lives is unrealistic, science wants to understand that which we cannot eliminate, thus more effective sensors are needed. Material scientist Rutuja Bhusari combines materials at nanoscale to create a gas sensor powered by nature.

Spotlight on Young Researchers: Mohammad Zare

Floods across the world have resulted in tremendous economic damage and loss of lives: better tools to predict flood rise and recession are needed. The biggest question facing researchers like Mohammad Zare is how to accurately simulate and predict this complex phenomenon. As part of an Industrial Fellowship between the University of Luxembourg and company RSS-Hydro, the Postdoc Works on improving the simulation and prediction of flash floods, with the goal to develop a decision-making model for flood protection in Luxembourg.

Spotlight on Young Researchers: The human gut microbiome and the clues it holds

Research is steadily painting a picture revealing the significance the human gut microbiome plays in health and disease. From gastrointestinal tract disorders to the beginnings and treatment of Parkinson’s disease and beyond, the gut microbiome is a treasure trove of clues for researchers. We speak to three women in science – a biomedical scientist, a microbiologist and a bioscience engineer – about organs-on-chips and restoring an imbalanced microbiome.

Spotlight on Young Researchers: Assessing the sustainability of Luxembourgish agriculture

Deforestation and soil degradation is one of many consequences of climate change. Food production systems alone are responsible for around a quarter of annual emissions. Researchers in Luxembourg are working with local actors to create models to help assess the sustainability of Luxembourgish farms.

Spotlight on Young Researchers: Understanding our immune system

Stemming from Italy, Indonesia, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain, the members of the Experimental & Molecular Immunology Group truly are an international team. In the group of FNR ATTRACT Fellow Prof Dr Dirk Brenner at the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH), the team of young researchers investigates different aspects of the immune system with one common goal: Understanding how our immune system is regulated by different mechanisms – and how this knowledge can be used to combat disease.

Spotlight on Young Researchers: The hidden half of plants

The hidden part of plants – the root systems – play a vital role both in plant survival, and in our ecosystem, as plants store carbon in the soil. Scientists are working to understand how roots are affected by changes in water availability, but how do researchers even approach the study of roots?

Spotlight on Young Researchers: Nature’s shapes as mathematical challenges

In nature, we see hyperbolic forms in corals, flatworms, and many other species of reef organisms, such as sponges and kelps. The hyperbolic spaces are also of interest for mathematicians, who are looking to prove the solvability of invariant systems of differential equations in unusual spaces such as these.

Spotlight on Young Researchers: Neighbourhood characteristics as determinants of health

Unhealthy lifestyles – unbalanced diet and physical inactivity – are the main factor in the leading cause of death in the world: cardiometabolic disease. Our socioeconomic environment plays a role in these lifestyle choices. Over a 9-year period, researchers are looking at how socio-economic and physical environmental characteristics of residential neighbourhoods shape our physical activity, nutritional behaviour and cardiometabolic health.

Spotlight on Young Researchers: Isabel Z. Martínez

Isabel Z. Martínez has been interested in how policies are put in place and how they affect people’s lives for as long as she can remember. After completing her Masters in Economics, she realised that academia was the ideal way to quench her thirst for analysing large data sets and finding answers to questions addressing people’s well-being and policy decisions. The Swiss-Spanish national has been studying income and wealth inequality in Switzerland for years and has now come to Luxembourg as a Postdoc at LISER to expand her research to the Grand Duchy. We spoke to Isabel about life as a research economist, and how it has already enabled her to travel across the globe, as well as work with some of the foremost researchers in her field.

This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the use of cookies for analytics purposes. Find out more in our Privacy Statement