Stefano Aliani is Director of Science at the Institute of Marine Science of the National Research Council of Italy (Section of Lerici, La Spezia – Italy).
He works on physical oceanography and ecology, focussing on marine hydrodynamic processes and their climate and ecological implications. He has been working on distribution and dispersal of marine debris since the 1990s. He is a seagoing scientist working in different environments including polar areas, deep sea, and hydrothermal vents.
He has been personally involved in many projects and authored over 150 papers, books and proceedings. In 2017, he won the award “Change the world one article at the time”: the Editors-in-Chief of Springer Nature journals across disciplines selected the scientific findings published in 2016 that they believe could have the greatest impact on society’s most urgent problems.
He is member of many international working groups of experts. He has been the chair or member of steering committees in several national and international projects. He is the Italian representative of SCOR and chair of the SCOR Working Group 153 on Floating Litter and its Oceanic TranSport Analysis and Modelling. He is also now one of the Vice-Presidents of SCOR.
He regularly communicated scientific results with the media and was an author and TV presenter for documentaries and science dissemination programs.