Maria Cristina Rulli is a Full Professor of Hydraulic and Maritime Constructions and Hydrology at the Politecnico di Milano. Since 2021, she has served as Vice President of the Italian Group of Hydraulic Engineering (GII). Since 2015, she has been a member of the steering committee of the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Sustainability and Human Security: Co-Operation & Governance Agendas.
M.C. Rulli obtained her PhD in Hydraulic Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano. She was a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), and later an Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. She currently teaches the courses Water and Food Security and Global Environmental Changes within the Environmental Engineering program, and Climate and Hydrology in the Architecture and Urban Planning program at the Politecnico di Milano. She also teaches the course Sustainable Water and Food Security within the PhD program in Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering and the advanced training program Honours Programme in Engineering for Sustainable Development.
She is the author of over 170 scientific papers in the fields of hydrology, river geomorphology, slope stability, global water resources, and the assessment of natural resources under global change scenarios. Her recent research has focused on the interaction between hydrological processes and society. Using the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus perspective, she has investigated the impacts of global change on food and water security. She has studied the emerging phenomenon of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions (LSLA) and its implications for food security, water governance, rural livelihoods, and the emergence of water-related conflicts.
Her most recent work explores the relationship between environment and health, particularly the links between unsustainable food systems and the emergence of diseases (e.g., food-related, non-communicable, and zoonotic diseases).
For her research, she has been awarded the PRINCE SULTAN ABDULAZIZ INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WATER – CREATIVITY PRIZE. She was recognized UNION FELLOW by THE AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION and was elected FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND ARTS.
According to Scopus (data from July 2025), her work has received a total of 7,863 citations (11,588 on Google Scholar, 7,059 on Web of Science), and her h-index is 50 (59 on Google Scholar, 46 on WoS). The Web of Science classifies 7 of her publications as Highly Cited Papers, placing them in the top 1% of most-cited articles in their field, and 1 as a Hot Paper, ranking in the top 0.1%.
According to Ioannidis (2023), M.C. Rulli ranks in the top 2% of the most influential researchers worldwide.