Paola Malanotte Rizzoli is an Italian physical oceanographer known for her research on ocean circulation and sea level rise, especially with respect to flooding conditions in Venice.
As a child growing up in Venice, Malanotte Rizzoli had a passion for music and by age eleven learned La Traviata while considering a future as an opera singer.
[7] She remained at Scripps as a Cecil and Ida Green scholar from 1978 until 1980 at which point she moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),[8] and again was the only woman in physical oceanography.
[16] In the early 2000s, Malanotte Rizzoli began work on climate science through a project that led to the development of a coupled ocean-atmosphere model in Southeast Asia where the Indonesian Throughflow allows passage of water from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.
[7] The storm surge in Venice, the Acqua alta, has been the focus of her work and from 1995 until 2013, she was a consultant for Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the group tasked with the building the barriers designed to block the flow of water into the Venetian lagoon, the MOdulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (MOSE) project.