Nadia Pinardi

The 2007 Fridtjof Nansen Medal is awarded to Nadia Pinardi for her valuable promotion of physical oceanography and her distinguished leadership in operational oceanography of the Mediterranean Sea.

Professor Nadia Pinardi has from the very beginning of her career developed and led a network of young and promising colleagues and scientists. After her PhD in Harvard, and since the mid-80s, when larger physical oceanography programmes such as POEM were started in the Mediterranean Sea, Nadia Pinardi got involved in problems of large scale circulation, air-sea interaction, eddy variability and high-resolution modelling. From Bologna, Nadia got engaged in the definition and later participation of EU-funded programmes that were planned to promote modern oceanography in the Mediterranean Sea. The way she choose to formulate those programmes as much as she was able to influence them was to develop operational oceanography systems for that sea. Nadia Pinardi mastered the art of combining challenging scientific ideas, finding the right collaborators and identifying the appropriate funding sources. Within 15 years there is a live and active oceanographic community around the Mediterranean Sea that has tilted the balances in Europe towards the South. And there are the backbones of operational oceanographic systems for the Mediterranean Sea.