RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DELLA BASILICATA

ITALY

WATER, LANDSCAPE, AND NATURE have played an important role in Raffaele Albano’s work as an engineer. He works to analyze their interaction—and human-impacted challenges—from a geospatial point of view, but also as a citizen who wants to be aware of his home. He is the co-founder of the Wat-TUBE spin-off, a start-up company devoted to the technology transfer of research results in geomatics and water resource management. He serves as young scientist representative of the Natural Hazard (NH) Division in the European Geosciences Union, providing an opportunity to re-think the role of early career scientists from consumers to contributors to the NH community. Raffaele has a great love for history and geo-heritages and cultivates this passion as a volunteer in the UNESCO Young Italian Commission.

Raffaele’s research and professional activities revolve around developing models and modeling applications, mainly published as open-source software, to support flood- and drought-risk management. He has developed plug-ins for QGIS (FloodRisk for flood damage estimations and GeomorphicFloodIndex for the delineation of flood-prone areas through a DEM-based approach), a software to help farmers improve agricultural water management called MYSIRR, and a webGIS application called READY to increase people’s awareness in landslide- and flood- risk prone areas. Raffaele also teaches abroad, at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels.