Velio Coviello, Cnr-Irpi researcher, victim of the avalanche in Valle d’Aosta
Velio Coviello, researcher at the Hydrogeological Protection Research Institute in Padua since the end of 2020, passed away suddenly in the avalanche that broke out on the afternoon of April 1 in Valle d’Aosta.
He graduated cum laude in 2009 in Environmental Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Turin and received his PhD in 2015, at the same university, with a thesis entitled “Debris flow seismic monitoring and warning” and spending a period abroad at the landslide research centre at the USGS Golden (Colorado, USA); he then developed post-doctoral research in Mexico (UNAM Geoscience Center) studying debris flows in volcanic environments (lahar) and was, between 2017 and 2020, a fixed-term researcher at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano.
His research interests concerned the characterisation of mass movements and solid transport through ground surveys and monitoring data. In particular, Velio conducted research on the use of environmental seismology for the automatic identification of landslide and torrential processes and the development of warning systems.
Velio was a passionate researcher with great intellectual vivacity and honesty.
His dedication to understanding environmental processes by integrating modelling approaches with intense and continuous field work remains a valuable legacy for the scientific world in the field of geo-hydrological hazards in mountain environments.
See also:
- Interview with Velio Coviello on TG2 Dossier of 10/15/2022 (between 2.10 and 3.30). Excerpts of this video were widely taken in the regional Rai services:
https://www.rainews.it/rubriche/tg2dossier/video/2022/10/TG2-Dossier-del-15102022-6a2019e4-1795-4ccc-b379-80d24417ff9c.html - https://www.ansa.it/piemonte/notizie/2023/04/02/scialpinisti-morti-in-valtournenche-identificati-i-corpi_64d7ba92-fd7b-4d6b-963b-146b7aa7e68c.html