Role
Full Professor of Paleontology and Paleoecology at the University of Milan, Department of Earth Sciences "Ardito Desio", and former president of the Italian Geological Society for the three-year period 2015-2017.
Bio
After graduating in Geological Sciences in 1982, he obtained a PhD in Earth Sciences at the University of Milan in 1987 and in 1987-1988 he carried out a post-doctoral fellowship at the Geological Institute of ETH Zurich.
Returning to Milan, in 1990 she became a researcher and in 2000 an associate professor at the university's Department of Earth Sciences, where she has been a full professor since 2005.
A specialist in calcareous nanofossils , microscopic organisms among the world's largest producers of calcite, which, deposited on the seafloor over millions of years, form a large portion of sediments, she uses them for biostratigraphy and paleo-oceanographic reconstructions. She studies the interactions between the geosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere, and the relationships between atmospheric CO2, climate, and ocean ecosystems. She believes that a geological perspective on major past climate changes helps us understand the causes and consequences of current and future ones. Through nanofossils, she also investigates the nature and origin of sapropelite, a sediment linked to the formation of hydrocarbons.
From 2015 to 2017, she was president of the Italian Geological Society. Since 2013, she has been a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and a member of the Academia Europaea, in the Earth and Cosmic Sciences section. She has been a member of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere since 2019.
Since 2024 he has been president of the International Commission on Stratigraphy.
In 2012 he received the Tartufari Prize for Geosciences from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and in 2022 the Jean Baptiste Lamarck Medal from the European Geosciences Union.