MUTTONI GIOVANNI

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Giovanni Muttoni, Department of Earth Sciences “Ardito Desio”, University of Milan, Via Luigi Mangiagalli 34, I-20133 Milan, Italy.
giovanni.muttoni1@unimi.it
ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giovanni_MuttoniResearcher
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.it/citations?user=fjpY3B0AAAAJ
Personal Web Page: https://sites.google.com/site/gmuttoniunimi/
ORCID: 0000-0001-7908-1664

Giovanni Muttoni is Full Professor of Stratigraphy (GEOS-02/B) at the Department of Earth Sciences “Ardito Desio” of the University of Milan, where he also serves as Coordinator of the PhD Program in Earth Sciences.

He graduated with honors in 1990 from the University of Milan with a thesis on the Triassic of the island of Hydra (Greece), and earned his PhD in 1994 at the same institution, in collaboration with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (USA), with a dissertation on the Tethyan Triassic magnetostratigraphy. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Lamont-Doherty (1994–1995), at the Institute of Marine Geology of the National Research Council (CNR) in Bologna (1995–1997), and served as Wissenschaftlicher Assistent at ETH Zurich (1997–2000). Concurrently, he held appointments as Adjunct Assistant Research Scientist at Lamont-Doherty (1996–2000) and at CNR Bologna (1998–2000).

In 2000, he returned to Italy as a researcher at the University of Milan, where he continued his academic career: he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006 and to Full Professor in 2019.

His research focuses on magnetostratigraphy, paleogeography, geodynamics, and the geological evolution of the Mediterranean region. He has made major contributions to the definition of the geomagnetic polarity timescale for the Triassic and Jurassic, to the paleogeographic reconstruction of Pangea, and to the tectonic evolution of the India–Asia collision. His work also addresses the response of Earth systems to plate motions across climatic belts and the greenhouse-to-icehouse transition in the Cenozoic. He has explored episodes of true polar wander during the Jurassic and has worked on the chronostratigraphic and paleoenvironmental reconstruction of early human occupation in Europe and North Africa.

Selected key publications include:
Early Permian Pangea ‘B’ to Late Permian Pangea ‘A (Muttoni et al., 2003, Earth and Planetary Science Letters),
Pangea B and the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (Kent & Muttoni, 2020, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology),
APTS for the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic (Kent et al., 2017, Earth-Science Reviews),
Adria and Permo-Triassic paleogeography (Channell et al., 2022, Earth-Science Reviews),
European arid anomaly and Jurassic polar shift (Muttoni et al., 2025, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems),
Equatorial convergence of India (Kent & Muttoni, 2008, PNAS),
Climate modulation by basaltic weathering (Kent & Muttoni, 2013, Climate of the Past),
Pleistocene glaciations in the Alps (Muttoni et al., 2003, Geology),
Human migration into Europe (Muttoni et al., 2010, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology),
North African Acheulean chronology (Gallotti et al., 2021, Scientific Reports).

He is the author of over 140 peer-reviewed scientific papers, with an h-index of 47 on Scopus (55 on Google Scholar) as of 2024, more than 6,100 citations on Scopus, and over 8,300 on Google Scholar. Approximately 78% of his publications are the result of international collaborations, and over 86% are published in journals ranked in the top quartile by CiteScore. Nearly half are among the top 25% most-cited papers worldwide. According to the 2024 Research.com ranking for Earth Sciences, Professor Muttoni ranks 36th nationally in Italy, with a Discipline H-index (D-index) of 54, 7,842 citations, and 211 publications.

He is a reviewer for prestigious journals including Nature Geoscience, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Tectonophysics, Journal of Geophysical Research, and Quaternary Science Reviews.

In terms of teaching, he delivers undergraduate and graduate courses in Stratigraphy, Geology, Paleomagnetism, and Paleogeography, and supervises numerous PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. Several of his mentees now hold academic positions at leading institutions, including the University of São Paulo and the University of Bremen. He also teaches the course Geological Evolution of a Habitable Planet in English as part of the Erasmus 4+ program, aimed at an international student body.

He has coordinated or participated in numerous national and international research projects, including PRIN 2020 DYNASTY – Neanderthals’ Dynamic Pathway and Resilience in Central Europe Through Chronometric Sustainability, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) with €243,000, and the SNSF project WETTEST. He has also contributed to several CARG projects for ISPRA, producing geological maps and stratigraphic syntheses of the Po Plain. He leads chronostratigraphic work through magnetostratigraphy at paleoanthropological sites in Casablanca (Morocco) and was Principal Investigator of the project Megalopolis and Kozarnica: the oldest archaeological sites in the Balkans, funded by the University of Milan’s Archaeological Excavation Fund in 2015.