Prof. Gabriele Manoli

CIS – “Get to know your neighbors” Seminar Series

“On trees and cities
Prof. Gabriele Manoli, Tenure Track Assistant Professor, Laboratory of Urban and Environmental Systems

Monday, Dec 19, 2022 3:15 – 4:15pm | Hybrid

Gabriele Manoli

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Trees and, more in general, vegetation regulate the exchanges of water, carbon, and energy at the land surface modulating a variety of biotic and abiotic processes occurring within the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Cities, on the other hand, disrupt such natural dynamics and modify the mass and energy budgets at the land surface with impacts on local climate and people’s wellbeing. Yet, the urbanization process exhibits striking similarities with plants and other biological systems which have also evolved to distribute resources in time and space. In this talk I will review recent work on modelling soil-plant processes as well as urban growth dynamics, hinting at the existence of “naturally intelligent” systems in the ecological and social domains.

Gabriele Manoli received a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering Sciences in 2014 from the University of Padova (Italy). From 2014 to 2016, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University (USA) and, from 2016 to 2019, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Engineering at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). In 2019 he joined University College London (UK) as a lecturer in Environmental Engineering and since September 2022 he is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at EPFL where he leads the Laboratory of Urban and Environmental Systems (URBES). His research focuses on soil-plant-atmosphere processes in natural and built environments, urban climate, and the structure and dynamics of cities.