Marta Zaniolo

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Marta Zaniolo joined Duke CEE as an assistant professor in January 2024. Her research addresses timely water sustainability challenges including how to ensure reliable and affordable access to water resources in the face of scarcity, competing demands, and a changing climate. She combines the fields of hydrology and water resources modeling with machine learning and data mining techniques to enable more informed decision-making about water use at scales large and small. Zaniolo holds a BS and MS degree in Environmental Engineering and a PhD in Information Technology earned in the Environmental Intelligence lab at Politecnico di Milano. Prior to joining Duke, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the CEE department at Stanford University.Learn more here: https://zeddlab.weebly.com/ 

Appointments and Affiliations

  • Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Contact Information

Education

  • B.S. Politecnico di Milano (Italy), 2014
  • M.S. Politecnico di Milano (Italy), 2017
  • Ph.D. Politecnico di Milano (Italy), 2020

Research Interests

Water resources planning and management, drought modeling and control, flexible climate change adaptation, conceptual and data-driven systems modeling, reinforcement learning for water systems, multi-objective control, feature extraction.

Courses Taught

  • CEE 690: Advanced Topics in Civil and Environmental Engineering
  • CEE 493: Research Independent Study in Civil and Environmental Engineering

In the News

Representative Publications

  • Jordan, S. M., J. D. Quinn, M. Zaniolo, M. Giuliani, and A. Castelletti. “Dam Reoperation to Mitigate Changing Climate Extremes in the Omo River Basin, Ethiopia (Accepted).” Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 150, no. 11 (November 1, 2024). https://doi.org/10.1061/JWRMD5.WRENG-6468.
  • Zaniolo, M., S. Fletcher, and M. S. Mauter. “Quantifying the Value of Technology and Policy Innovation in Water Resource Portfolios.” Earth’s Future 12, no. 5 (May 1, 2024). https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF004167.
  • Willebrand, K., M. Zaniolo, J. Skerker, and S. Fletcher. “Valuing Combinations of Flexible Planning, Design, and Operations in Water Supply Infrastructure.” Water Resources Research 60, no. 3 (March 1, 2024). https://doi.org/10.1029/2023WR036048.
  • Zaniolo, M., S. Fletcher, and M. Mauter. “FIND: A Synthetic weather generator to control drought Frequency, Intensity, and Duration.” Environmental Modelling and Software 172 (January 1, 2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2023.105927.
  • Fletcher, Sarah, Marta Zaniolo, Mofan Zhang, and Megan Lickley. “Climate oscillation impacts on water supply augmentation planning.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 120, no. 35 (August 2023): e2215681120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215681120.