Paolo Benettin

Biography

I am currently Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne. I will keep an affiliation with EPFL until my current projects based at EPFL have been completed.

I have a background in Environmental Engineering (Bachelor and Master studies) from the University of Padova, Italy. I hold a Ph.D. from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Padova. My Ph.D. thesis focused on hydrologic transport and travel time distributions at the catchment scale. During my Ph.D., I also spent 7 months as visiting research fellow at Virginia Tech University (Blacksburg, USA). In 2015 I moved to EPFL first as a postdoc and then in 2017.

Current work

I am currently conducting my research on the following subjects:

• Understanding and modeling the transport of solutes in hydrologic systems, with special regard to anthropized landscapes;
• Estimating water age and its variations in time for various catchments worldwide;
• Monitoring solute concentration in rivers during storms and developing new low-cost methodologies to measure at high-frequency;
• Numerical development of models for solute transport in rivers;
• Use of stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in the water molecule to trace ecohydrological processes;
• Experiments on hydrologic and solute mass balance in large lysimeters;