Andrea Rinaldo is Professor and Director of the Laboratory of Ecohydrology at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Professor in the Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering department at the University of Padua. His research focuses on water controls on biota, for which he has received international recognition including membership of the US National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is the co-author of Fractal River Basins: Chance and Self-Organization (with Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe, Cambridge, 1997).