Affiliation: Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences DISAT, University of Milano-Bicocca
Keywords: Climate-Tectonics interactions, Geodynamics, Geophysics, Numerical Modeling
Full profile:
Pietro Sternai graduated in Geology at the University of Milano (Italy) and obtained his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) in 2012. Two subsequent Postdocs brought him at the University of Orléans (France), Caltech (USA) and the University of Cambridge (UK).
He then moved to the University of Geneva (Switzerland) as an ‘Ambizione’ Fellow funded by the SNSF. In 2019, he became Assistant Professor of Structural Geology at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) and in 2022 he was promoted to Associate Professor in the same Department.
Pietro Sternai currently leads the Coupled System (CoSy) research group, whose main target is to unravel the climate-tectonics interactions and the role of magmatic-volcanic activity in affecting the geological carbon cycle using geodynamic and landscape evolution numerical modeling constrained by all sorts of geological observables. This multidisciplinary research is, and has been, supported by prestigious grants such as the Ambizione (SNSF) and Levi Montalcini (Italian Ministry of Education) fellowships and the Progetto Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022 (Italian Ministry of Education).
In 2019, 2020 and 2021, Pietro Sernai was awarded with three Young Talent Prizes by the University of Milano-Bicocca and Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (the most prestigious Italian Scientific Academy) and, in 2022, he won the Flinn-Hart award of the International Lithosphere Program. Pietro Sternai is Associate Editor of Journal of Geophysical Research – Solid Earth since 2020 and has been invited to become a member of the Young Academy of Europe in 2022.