Francesco Fedele, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Contact
Office: PARB A236
Email: ffedele3@gtsav.gatech.edu
Research Thrusts
Ocean Engineering
Fluid Mechanics
Biomedical Engineering
Links
Education
Ph.D., Civil Engineering, University of Vermont, 2004
Laurea (magna cum laude), Civil Engineering, University Mediterranea ITALY, 1998
Research Interests
  • Fluid mechanics of nonlinear water waves
  • Stochastic modeling and Monte Carlo simulations of ocean waves
  • Statistics of extreme events: theory of quasi-determinism
  • Rogue waves and their statistics
  • Wave turbulence: statistics, extreme events, and computational modeling
  • Computational methods: Finite element methods, Boundary element methods and collocation methods
  • Hydrodynamics stability in pipe flows, transition to turbulence
  • Inverse problems in biomedical engineering: fluorescence optical tomography
  • Meteorology: atmospheric data assimilation for quasi-geostrophic flows; Kalman Filter techniques and model reduction

Dr. Fedele’s research interests encompass practical and theoretical aspects of ocean engineering problems. These include the stochastic modeling and prediction of non-linear wave phenomena, the understanding of the dynamics of wave groups and the generation of extreme events in wave turbulence. His research focuses also in understanding the physical phenomena that cause the arising of unusually large waves in open ocean, the so-called Rogue waves, by using analytical methods, Monte Carlo simulations and experimental verification in the ocean. Dr. Fedele is also interested in computational methods; he proposed a single degrees-of-freedom Hermite collocation technique, called LOCOM for solving multi-phase flow problems in porous media. In the context of Petrov-Galerkin methods, he is interested in new numerical schemes, locally mass-conservative, for the sub-grid stabilization of advection-diffusion partial differential equations. In the context of biomedical engineering, he applied finite element techniques and the boundary element method to develop algorithms able to detect the presence of cancer in the human breast (optical tomography). Dr. Fedele is also interested in some specific mathematical and computational aspects in weather forecast relative to data assimilation systems for quasi-geostrophic dynamics, based on Kalman Filter techniques.