She is Italian and from Ingv, the researcher selected to be part of the over 200 autobiographies of women scientists in the field of oceanography, recently collected in a special volume of Oceanography magazine, entitled Women in Oceanography - A Decade Later
A research activity mainly at sea, dedicated to the study of both tectonic and volcanic crustal systems, through the correlation between seismic, geophysical and oceanographic data. It is with this motivation that Tiziana Sgroi, a researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Ingv), was selected by Oceanography magazine, to be part of the over 200 autobiographical sketches of women scientists in the field of oceanography, recently published in a volume special titled Women in Oceanography - A Decade Later (http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/27-4_supplement.html).
"It is an immense satisfaction, both at a professional and personal level," says Ingv researcher Tiziana Sgroi. “Being one of the two Italians invited to participate in this initiative (the other is Sara Pensieri from the Institute of Studies on Intelligent Systems for Automation of the National Research Council, Issia-Cnr,) filled me with pride, above all for the implications in terms of recognition of the activity carried out in a field which, in general, is not yet well established and supported in Italy”. The INGV researcher was invited to present her autobiography following the recent publication, in the same journal, of the article Geohazards in the Western Ionian Sea Insights from Non-Earthquake Signals Recorded by the NEMO-SN1 Seafloor Observatory (http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2014.51), which highlighted the possible sources of instability of the Ionian Sea bed, through the analysis of seismic data not associated with earthquakes.
“The reasons that led to the re-proposition of this initiative, 10 years after the drafting of the first volume (Women in Oceanography, published in March 2005; http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/18-1.html), is quite understandable”, continues the researcher. “Gender equality in the world of research is far from being achieved. In the initial part of the volume, a series of articles highlight how low gender percentages are still in the field of research worldwide. In the United States, the statistics on employment and career opportunities in the academic field of female scientists involved in oceanography show values of 30% in the case of Assistant Professors and less than 20% in the case of Full/Senior Professors. Furthermore, the data concerning female participation in the oceanographic campaigns of the Ocean Drilling Program (Odp), an international cooperation created to explore and study the composition and structure of our planet's ocean basins, is around 30%. In both cases, in Europe the percentages are lower, as for example in ODP campaigns in which female participation is less than 10%”.
Ellen Kappel, Editor of the magazine, selected the authors of the biographies on the basis of three elements: from the submission of scientific articles on Oceanography, as first authors, to participation in conferences, as invited speakers or discussion leaders, up to to the AGU Fellows certification. "This publication has allowed me to tell in a simple way the multidisciplinary research activities that I carry out, the motivations and the challenges that I face every day", concludes Sgroi. The autobiography is available at the link: http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/27-4_supp_bios.html
Rome 10 February 2015