Marj Tonini is a spatial data scientist with a strong interest on geospatial modelling for risk assessment, mainly related to wildfires and landslides. She gained her PhD in 2002 at Sant’Anna School of advanced studies (Pisa, Italy), defending a thesis on agro-environmental modelling. She started working at the University of Lausanne in 2004, as post-doc and, in 2008, she was appointed senior research manager at the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics (current position).
Her research focuses on the development of innovative approaches allowing to enable efficient learning from complex environmental datasets. She seeks to set up a methodological framework to understand the spatio-temporal dynamic of environmental processes and to assess the influence of predictor variables. Her current research targets are on land use/land cover change analyses and on the elaboration of predictive scenario and susceptibility / risk assessment for natural hazard.