Born 1989 in Italy. After completing a B.Sc. in Forestry and Environmental Sciences at the Polytechnic University of Marche (Italy), she pursued an international Erasmus Mundus M.Sc. in Sustainable Forest and Nature Management (SUFONAMA) at Georg-August Universität Göttingen (Germany) and Bangor University (UK). She graduated with a second M.Sc. in Forestry and Environmental Sciences from the University of Padova (Italy). In 2017, she obtained her doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) in Natural Sciences at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Germany), with a thesis on the climate change adaptation of the Black Forest. Her doctoral thesis was recognized with the Göttinger Prize for Forest Ecosystem Research.
She worked as postdoctoral researcher at Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada) and at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), where she coordinated the Biodiversity Centre and contributed to the Ecosystem Ecology research unit. Since 2024 she has been Oberassistant – Senior Scientist and Lecturer at ETH Zürich, co-leading several international collaborations on forest resilience and climate adaptation.
Valentina Vitali co-leads major interdisciplinary projects (SNSF RareSpec, ETH IntroSpec, WSL Defoliation-Track) and is actively involved in Horizon Europe project TRANSFORMIT, where she leads reviews on integrated forest management. She is an active member of COST-Actions on European forest biosecurity and climate responses CLEANForest, and ITUF. She is associate editor of Plant Monitor (Frontiers in Forest and Global Change), and member of the Association of Tree Ring Research (ATR) and the European Geosciences Union (EGU). She is committed to mentoring and supporting early-career scientists, including through women-oriented mentoring initiatives.
Valentina Vitali’s research focuses on the resilience of forest ecosystems under global change, with particular emphasis on climate impacts, drought, and biological stressors. She bridges physiological, ecological, and biogeochemical perspectives to explore how trees and forest communities respond to interacting factors and biotic and abiotic stressors. Combining long-term tree-ring analyses with field experiments and studies of plant physiology and biochemistry, she investigates how forest diversity, structure, and functional traits shape ecosystem stability and carbon–water cycling. Her approach emphasizes the synergy between empirical data, experimental manipulation, and large-scale monitoring to guide adaptive, integrated forest management that supports biodiversity and multifunctionality in both temperate and urban forests. Through projects across Europe and North America, she develops innovative strategies to balance climate mitigation, ecosystem resilience, and biodiversity promotion.
