Francesco Fedele, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Contact
Office: PARB A236
Email: ffedele3@gtsav.gatech.edu
Research Thrusts
Fluid Mechanics
Numerical Analysis
Inverse Problems
Applied Mathematics
Links
Education
Ph.D., Civil Engineering, University of Vermont, 2004
Ph.D. Thesis "Novel Numerical Techniques for Problems in Engineering Science"
Laurea (magna cum laude), Civil Engineering, University Mediterranea ITALY, 1998
Thesis "Analytical Study of the Interaction Water Waves & Submerged Horizontal Cylinders"
Research Interests
  • Fluid mechanics: oceanic turbulence, nonlinear water waves, hydrodynamics stability, multi-phase flows.
  • Numerical analysis: Finite Element Methods, Boundary element Methods, Spectral Methods and Collocation Methods
  • Inverse problems: fluorescence optical tomography for breast cancer research
  • Applied mathematics: transition to turbulence and extreme events, solitons and defects in photonic lattices

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.