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EGU Award Ceremony (Credit: EGU/Foto Pfluegl)

Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Awards 2021 Giorgia Dalla Santa

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Giorgia Dalla Santa

Giorgia Dalla Santa
Giorgia Dalla Santa

ERE Energy, Resources and the Environment

The 2021 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Giorgia Dalla Santa for her outstanding research on shallow geothermal systems for building conditioning.

Giorgia Dalla Santa completed her PhD at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Padova, Italy in 2016. Currently, she is working as a postdoctoral research fellow within a Horizon 2020 EU project at the University of Padova and is closely collaborating with the Polytechnique Montréal in Canada.

In the short period since she obtained her PhD, Dalla Santa has developed her own research interests and has built a solid research network, both at the national and international level. Dalla Santa has developed innovative research on the investigation of thermal and geotechnical issues related to anti-freezing brines as heat carrier fluids in vertical Borehole Heat Exchangers (BHE), thus facing energetic and environmental issues about the freezing-thawing processes induced in the BHE vicinity and their effects. Her skills include experimental and modelling analysis of rock and sediment thermal properties as well as alterations of sediment mechanical properties. For this purpose, she developed a prototype of a thermally controlled oedometer to measure deformations, compressibility, and permeability in cohesive sediments. The findings were not only published in high-level publications but also had practical implications and were applied to the analysis of thermal effects on landfill construction techniques. Dalla Santa has an enthusiastic and solid approach in collecting and analysing scientific data and a natural inclination to teamwork, especially as team leader.

It is worth noting that Dalla Santa not only has an excellent publishing track record, but her research is also having a high impact on the scientific community, as shown by the high number of citations. Furthermore, she is very active in the Energy, Resources and the Environment Division community, contributing both as author and convener at EGU General Assemblies. In 2020 she led the new session, entitled “Shallow geothermal systems for building heating and cooling; geoscience and engineering approaches”, very successfully.