 Well, my name is Andrea Rinaldo as you gathered and I'm a Purdue PhD class of 1983, I'm currently a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne in Switzerland and still I hold an appointment in my alma mater in Padua for the undergraduate degree Padua where actually I'm I call home actually that's what I'm addressing you from here you're going to the lockdown that prevents me to go effect to to Lausanne and at the PFL I direct the laboratory of eco-hydrology which I established in 2008 and and I mean my main professional subject is a teaching at the name of my lab is eco-hydrology which is a discipline I helped established throughout the years in fact it's a relatively new it's it's a water controls on living communities and the beast I'll be I'll be getting back to you so what I'm I'm supposed to talk to you about my career impacts in fact and how did the Purdue in fact help along those lines it helped a lot as as you will gather and I'm grateful for the education I received at Purdue well in terms of impact the main line my main line of research has been like kind of train of thoughts at the last of like 20 years along the how both chance and necessity together in fact shape the fluvia landscape a river network landscape and its ecosystem services for species like populations and pathogens so in brief seeing from an era angle of of a of a of a rivers and their organization how nature works there's something that interests me deeply and this allows you to touch base with science and engineering issues like floods like droughts like a fair distribution of water down to issues like population migrations and disease spread that sadly are so important nowadays my major career impacts I was fortunate enough to to become full professor early on was 30 years old in the Italian system which is a strange and interesting credit while but sometimes it has opportunities like the ones that I was fortunate to grab early on and and when I got the recognition from my peers and among the things I most coveted on I got a few prizes few international prizes actually for water including the Prince Sultan of the Aziz International Water Prize years back or certain or a medal of adult medal for the EGU most importantly membership in learning institutions and here Purdue means very much in fact I'm a member of the National Academy of Engineering of as far as associate because I'm not a citizen and the National Academy of Sciences the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Italian National Academy Eileen Che the oldest university that cannot be classified as the oldest serving in fact academy because it was disconnected for about 100 years to the 19th century but anyways I'm very proud of that affiliation as well why did Purdue help it helped a lot first of all for my feeling very much attached to my American education to that certain the freedom then the the idea that there's no glass ceiling that prevents a foreigner to achieve in science and for the superb education the superb graduate education I got actually and thanks to that the basic tools that I received from my graduate school at Purdue they gave me the freedom to look across different cultural landscapes and perhaps innovate and innovate in that in that matter and as you will see this reverberates my gratitude for the education I got from the splendid time I spent in West Lafayette another issue I'd love to touch base is how did the journey to become a Purdue Boil America came about well it was a curious thing I owe in fact my infectious vocation for the academy who was born in Padua was an undergraduate student and owe into great teachers and mentors that they became later became colleagues like Claudio Datei very close friend and the guy who's chair inherited back later on and but what was clear at the time there was no doctoral program in Italy we pretended that our five-year degree was some sort of an in-between between an undergraduate and the master degree and was like a doctoral degree but it was obvious if you check the literature and you I wanted to learn I wanted to know where's the frontier of nor was the frontier of knowledge at the time it was very clear that it wasn't so I wanted to pursue graduate studies so in a typical Italian path I told to my senior professor there to contact someone in the U.S. to recommend for graduate school so and he was pressable yellow then the president of a New York University but talk to get it to this at the time was the director of a water section whatever it was called every department civil engineering when I grew up and and that was curious because then he contacted professor Giorgini my advisor late professor Giorgini whom I remember with with love no matter how he died very early in fact it was very unfortunate person and and well it so happened that I had accepted another offer from major technical university but press Giorgini called my home and and just got me so enthusiastic and I decided to go for Purdue that's how it all came about then the the other thing I'm supposed to comment on and I'm delighted to do so is about how Purdue engineering prepared for my current job well what Purdue taught me mind you but while I was there Herbert Brown got the Nobel Prize for chemistry and I and the sheer enthusiasm that that probe that um resonated through campus meant a lot to me as well but many ideas that um in fact the Purdue engineering taught me to fear nothing and the fact that they gave me that spirit that the engineering speedy mind you I'm inaugural Neil Armstrong fellow and talking about endeavor and how how in fact uh you can actually believe in something bigger than what you might be designed to do at any stage of your career and um so I'll the the kind of the idea that well we may not know uh not much about that the technical you might need to a certain problem but the main engineering basis engineering is computation is famously said is to understand one problem well and for there to fear nothing if you don't know something you learn it I can learn anything that's why I taught myself to become first I was a theoretician my PhD was in fluid mechanics great great gym for mental activity for mental speculation and for mathematical and computational tools I told myself to became a field person and a lab person because I was interested in a particular problem so fieldwork lab work and theoretical work together was the mark is the mark of my lab in fact that's very much rooted in the rooted in the engineering spirit I built at Purdue in fact and um and uh I'm also asked to comment on my favorite uh boiler making memory well that's that's fairly easy in fact uh to remember the first the most important thing was it was the the enchantment of my of my uh of getting into my married student apartment at Tower Drive as a newlywed I brought my wife of a few days uh at Purdue and she was a medical doctor student in Padua but she left everything to follow me for a while then she got back to to graduate but for us we are the old school where we didn't even go to uh alone to vacation together so for us it was a complete enchantment and that and I visited recently the the marriage student apartments up in Tower Drive near Verezavor are still very much like I left them like 40 years ago and that's certainly the the nicest memory we had mind you that after we flew in on a Friday and on a Sunday it was 1981 um the we reached minus 75 degrees Fahrenheit on a Sunday morning it was a kind of a cold welcome but uh West Lafayette gave us those days and and I'll always remember that but I remember also fondly friendships that lasted for a lifetime and I'd love to mention in particular my classmate Christopher Burke who's a major figure in professional landscape in Chicago and throughout Illinois and Indiana and on a national scale now and and and the very dear personal friend after so many years so um in in wrapping up my message is that why Purdue was so important Purdue was so important because um it it um taught me uh to ask myself whether I had tools for uh for wondering what's next where's the gold medal uh if I don't have the tools uh to reach what I said as my goal you can actually uh build the tools you can learn anything you may not know much but you can learn anything and anything that you want and in a sense uh will uh I always remember those years as the most formative of my life actually and I've been so proud when um I was uh granted the inaugural visiting fellowship Neil Armstrong Fellowship visiting professorship whatever it is called that gave me a chance to get back to campus as I had before through the courtesy of the Department of Civil Engineering that with which I kept maintaining contacts throughout the years so um this is pretty much what I had to tell you but um I can tell you that the only thing which uh it's it's a deep uh wound for me not to be able to be with you in person but um I'm looking forward very much uh to see you as soon as possible when all these uh a mess of the pandemics will allow me to I promise it