Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Assistant Professor
Research in the Di Santo Lab aims to make fundamental advances in our understanding of fish locomotor performance across their life history and evolutionary diversity and to apply those discoveries to reveal their relationship to changing environmental conditions. This interdisciplinary research incorporates a wide range of methodologies, including biomechanical, physiological, and robotic approaches as well as rearing experiments and artificial intelligence. We have established collaborative teams with engineers, computer scientists, and anatomists to leverage biological data for the study of fish locomotor diversity, underwater propulsion, and the development of efficient artificial swimmers and computational models for experimental testing.
Bio
Valentina is a fish ecophysiologist and biomechanist. She was born in La Spezia, a town by the sea in Italy. She studied Natural Sciences and Conservation Biology at the University of Firenze in Italy. Her love for fishes brought her to the University of West Florida where she studied the effect of temperature on digestion rates and efficiency in stingrays and sharks. She then moved to Boston University to study in the Marine Program for her PhD, where she quantified the effects of ocean acidification and warming on little skate development, energetics and escape performance. At Boston University she also studied the effect of body size on thermal sensitivity in cleaner gobies from Florida and Belize. During that time, she conducted field work and taught several classes in the Marine Semester in Belize. After completing her PhD, she worked in George Lauder's Lab at Harvard University as a Postdoctoral Fellow, where she focused her research on biomechanics of fish locomotion. Currently, she combines eco-physiology and biomechanics tools to understand how fishes adjust their locomotor behavior when challenged by abiotic factors, such as temperature, pH, oxygen, and flow. Outside the lab, Valentina enjoys music, improving her ukulele playing skills, swimming and surfing.