A –Streams of Thought– contribution by Wouter Knoben (WK)
Francesca Pianosi is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. She currently holds a prestigious Early Career EPSRC “Living with Environmental Change” Fellowship and was awarded the EGU Arne Richter award for Outstanding Young Scientists in 2015. Her research focuses around uncertainty and sensitivity analysis, and water resources management. She is the lead developer of the SAFE Global Sensitivity Analysis toolbox (Matlab/R/Python: www.safetoolbox.info).
WK: Can you tell us a little about your background, your formal education?
I did an MSc in Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Milano and stayed there to do a PhD in Informatics Engineering. This is essentially the engineering version of computer science. The department had people working on a wide variety of topics but I was part of a small group inside it that applied mathematical theory to environmental problems (my PhD project focused on water resources modelling). There were three professors there working on atmospheric systems, population dynamics and water systems respectively, so we used to say “Air, Animals and Water are covered” (we missed Earth!). On the one hand it was very nice to be part of such a varied department, because I got exposed to many different topics and that is good for building confidence. On the other hand, I would sometimes end up in seminars about stabilizing space rockets during landing, which was not really directly useful for my work!