Vito A. Vanoni, Ph.D.

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(1904 - 1999)
https://www.nae.edu/28427/Dr-Vito-A-Vanoni
Vanoni, Vito August (1940) Experiments on the transportation of suspended sediment by water. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/CYT2-W932.
Vito Vanoni made his first appearance on the Caltech campus 52 years ago when be enrolled as an undergraduate student. He then went on to earn his BS (1926), MS (1932), and PhD (1940) degrees in civil engineering, and began his official academic career at the Institute in 1942, when he was appointed assistant professor of hydraulics—having spent the intervening years in a mixture of studies, work, and research.

Though he has been on the Caltech faculty for 32 years, he has taught his specialty—sedimentation—to more foreign students than Americans. What’s more, he’s done it mostly in Spanish. In 1959 he took part in a U.S. government‑funded AID project to upgrade the education of practicing Chilean engi­neers. The project seemed so worthwhile—both to Vanoni and to the Chileans—that he did it again in 1962. His Chilean students indicated their appreciation by translating his lectures (given in English at that time) into Spanish and publishing them as a text. News of such a practical and successful idea has a way of crossing national borders, and in 1967 he was invited by the Venezuelan government to lecture at the University of Venezuela, an invitation he was able to accept and carry out in Spanish. He did so again in 1971, ‘72, and ‘73, and will be off to Caracas again this summer.

Vito is internationally known as a consultant on water projects and problems, but his very special interest for many years has been the movement of water in its natural state, in rivers and floods (aqua motus naturalis). Like a river, Vito himself has meandered over the globe in pursuit of his studies. Having a special interest in sediment transport by rivers, he collected samples of sand from the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Parana, the Nile (which he pursued to its source in Lake Victoria), the Yukon (from which he panned gold dust), the Volga, the Sepic River in New Guinea, the Skang River in Malaysia, the Colorado River, and the River Jordan.

In addition to his academic research, Vito has also carried out applied research on the stability of water in harbors, and on wave action, and numerous engineering projects have profited from this work.
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