Foreign Affiliates

The NCED Foreign Affiliate program aims to establish global partnerships in earth surface dynamics by fostering the international exchange of students, and visitors (short visits and sabbaticals) to NCED facilities and by mentoring young international scholars.

If you are interested in becoming an NCED foreign affiliate, please send William Dalbotten (dalbo004@umn.edu) a summary of:


(a) your research interests,

(b) how you would interact with NCED researchers, and

(c) how the interdisciplinary intellect and facilities of NCED might advance your career.

Current list of our Foreign Affiliates: Rolf Alto, Cristian Escauriaza, Antonio Parodi

Rolf Alto, University of Exeter

Rolf researches rivers and erosion across 6 continents, including: South America (Beni, Mamore, Orinoco & Ucayali Rivers), North America (Sacramento-CA, Feather-CA & Salmon-ID Rivers & Rio Grande-NM), Australia (Strickland & Fly Rivers PNG), Europe (Danube River Romania), and Asia (Mekong River, Cambodia & exploratory sites in China). He leads the Exeter Radiometry Lab, which features world-class analytical facilities for tracing and dating particle movement throughout a wide range of fluvial dispersal systems. He develops novel field surveying/sampling and laboratory techniques to quantify processes across a range of fluvial environments as well as working to enhance remotely sensed data (SRTM and Aster). His currently funded research projects include a Critical Zone Observatory (CRB-CZO), a NSF-Margins project studying fluvial and biogeochemical processes in Papua New Guinea, a NSF project studying the evolution of the Sacramento River system, a NSF project studying wildfire erosion in Idaho, and a NERC project investigating the evolution of the Beni River System in Bolivia.

Rolf’s teaching focuses on the application of GIS, modeling, and laboratory methods to solving problems within River Basin Science. Students rate his modules highly, especially for ‘development‘, and graduates report employability exceeding 90%. He is delighted to lead 2nd year field trips to Washington State, New Zealand, and South Africa. 

Cristian Escauriaza, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Cristian is an Assistant Professor of Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, in Santiago, South America. He obtained his M.S. from Georgia Tech and completed his PhD at the University of Minnesota supported by NCED. He also participated in the first NCED Summer Institute in 2009.

His research focuses on physical processes in aquatic environments for a wide range of scales. The applications include the flow hydrodynamics past instream structures for stream restoration, river morphodynamics, floods, sediment transport mechanisms by turbulent coherent structures, and tidal energy in coastal regions. He is currently involved in a multidisciplinary research in the extremely arid region of northern Chile, aimed at unveiling the relations among river hydrodynamics, sediment transport, and biogeochemical processes.

Cristian looks forward to interacting with NCED members in integrating hydrology, hydrodynamics and geochemistry to investigate watersheds in extreme environments, study anthropogenic impacts in rivers, and devise restoration measures in mountain streams.  Visit Cristian's Website.

Antonio Parodi, CIMA Foundation

Antonio Parodi is project leader at CIMA Research Foundation in Italy. He has research and operative experience in hydrometeorology and on fluid mechanics field, with a particular emphasis in statistical analysis of extremes and in computational fluid dynamics. Leading research interests concern the development of simplified models of dry and moist convection and the study of the main sources of uncertainty in the high-resolution numerical modelling of severe rainfall processes. Parallel to these topics interest is directed to the coupling of dynamical and stochastic downscaling approaches for fine-resolution rainfall prediction and the study of climatology of severe rainfall events in the Mediterranean region.

In the last three years, Antonio has expanded his research into the application of new ICT (Information Communication Technologies) approaches (Grid computing, cloud computing etc) to the hydro-meteorology research, HMR, (FP7 Projects DRIHMS, Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology Study – www.drihms.eu, and DRIHM, Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology – www.drihm.eu): both projects have been carried out in cooperation with NCED and in particular with Professor Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, acting as advisory board member.

In addition to the scientific contributions on the aforementioned projects Antonio also serves as a liaison between NCED and CIMA Research Foundation activities in the fields of flood risk prediction, modelling and evaluation, as well as with reference to hydro-meteorological predictability and predictive ability, and forest fires and other risks related climate-soil-vegetation interactions.