N E W S

Farewell to Stefano

01.08.2018

After 8 years of very productive work, our colleague Stefano Serafin has formally left the Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics. After studies at Universities of Milano and Trento, where he worked as postdoctoral researcher until 2010, he joined the Department in October 2010 as University Assistant of Vanda Grubisic, then Professor of Theoretical Meteorology.

Soon he took responsibility in teaching Theoretical Meteorology as well as supervising undergraduate and graduate students. Only one year after Stefano's term started, Prof. Grubisic took on the lead of the Earth Observing Laboratory at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and was available to the group only sporadically in the coming five years - a gap filled by Stefano with great commitment.

In addition to his sizeable teaching load and responsibilities in the daily supervising of students he started managing existing research projects (EU project ROTOR) and acquiring new ones (e.g., FWF project STABLEST).

Despite these demanding tasks he managed to publish several papers on boundary layer separation, atmospheric turbulence and other mountain-meteorological problems with his co-workers, all in high impact journals, which significantly shaped the group's profile during his term. In the past one and a half years he contributed to the project ICE CONTROL devoted to understand the mechanisms of ice growth on wind turbines and to improve its prediction.

The University's strict rules on chain contracts prevented the continuation of his fruitful working relationship beyond July 2018. He will visit us, however, for meetings related to publications on ICE CONTROL results.

We wish him all the best in his new position at the University of Innsbruck.

Thank you Stefano for all your contributions, both scientifically and socially! We will miss you as a pleasant and exemplary colleague and we hope you will stay in touch with us for years to come.