Monica Riva

Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, her research activity has been focused mainly (about 130 publications, of which more than 80 on international journals included in the Journal Citation Report) on subsurface flow and transport dynamics, parameter estimation, stochastic groundwater hydrology, probabilistic well capture zones, scaling in hydrology, stochastic inverse modeling, uncertainty quantification, multiphase flows, oil recovery, experimental, analytical and numerical methods, interpretation and modeling of experimental data, groundwater management.

One of her main contributions is the development of exact and approximated formalisms for prediction of groundwater flow fields processes governing the spreading of conservative and reactive solutes in hydro-geo-chemically heterogeneous geomaterials by means of conditional moments of the state variable of interest. On the basis of such theoretical framework original analytical and numerical solutions of the investigated processes have been derived. She developed and applied innovative stochastic and upscaling techniques to study multiphase flow features of immiscible and miscible fluids. She has developed a theory (sub-Gaussian models) able to capture the non-Gaussian and scaling behavior exhibited by many hydrological-hydrogeological-environmental variables. She has introduced novel metrics to perform global sensitivity analysis across multiple interpretive models with uncertain parameters. 

She is a leading scientist of the Groundwater research group of Polimi (DICA). The last peer review (year 2010) has evaluated this group as Excellent at international level.