Maria Rita D'Orsogna

Maria Rita Rosaria D'Orsogna (born 1972) is an Italian and American applied mathematician and environmental activist. She is a professor of mathematics at California State University, Northridge, where her research interests include swarm behaviour, quantitative methods in criminology, and racial disparities in drug overdoses. She is also known for a successful campaign to prevent offshore drilling for oil near Abruzzo, Italy.

Early life

D'Orsogna was born in The Bronx, New York, in 1972, to parents from Italy; they returned to Italy when she was a child, and she grew up in Abruzzo.

Academics

D'Orsogna earned a laurea in physics from the University of Padua in 1996, focusing on statistical mechanics and mentored by Attilio L. Stella. After a master's degree from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1998, supervised by Theodore L. (Ted) Einstein, she completed a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2003. Her dissertation, Charge transfer in DNA: the role of thermal fluctuations and of symmetry, was jointly chaired by Joseph Rudnick and Robijn Bruinsma.

She became a postdoctoral researcher in chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology from 2003 to 2004, and then in the mathematics department at UCLA from 2004 to 2007. She took her present position as a professor in the mathematics department at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) in 2007. At CSUN, she also became affiliated with the Institute for Sustainability in 2008. She added an adjunct professorship in computational medicine at UCLA in 2012. At UCLA, she was associate director of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics from 2018 to 2021.

Activism

After D'Orsogna learned in 2007 of a plan by Eni to begin offshore drilling near Ortona in Abruzzo, her parents' hometown, she began organizing against oil exploration in the area. By 2010, her campaign had succeeeded both in blocking these plans and in leading to a new Italian law against drilling near the Italian coast and its marine parks. After continued pressure from her campaign, the drilling limits were expanded again in 2015, but in 2022 this led to a large payout to the corporate inheritor of the drilling project, Rockhopper Exploration, who argued that the new limits on drilling caused unfair reductions on their potential future profits. For her efforts, she was named ambassador from Abruzzo to the world in 2014, and has been called the "Italian Erin Brockovich".

Closer to her home, she has also opposed development in Santa Monica, California.

External links

• Home page
• Maria Rita D'Orsogna publications indexed by Google Scholar