Ricerc@Sapienza

CMC coordinates a research group operating in the field of complex fluids. Under the PI’s guidance, the group dealt with theoretical, numerical, and experimental aspects of fluid mechanics, to be understood in a wide sense, ranging from scaling laws in turbulence, viscoelasticity, particle transport in turbulence, microfluidics, nanofluidics, Direct Numerical Simulations, phase transition and nucleation problems, cavitation, wettability,  biological barriers permeabilization. 

Research activity and publications include molecular dynamics, free-energy and rare event methods, phase-field approaches for mesoscale modeling, fluctuating hydrodynamics, specialized numerical techniques, micro-fabrication, and design of microfluidic chips, also for biological and biomedical applications. The activity is strongly multidisciplinary, involving disciplines such as fluid mechanics, statistical mechanics, applied mathematics, experimental physics, fabrication technology, material science, biology, and medicine.

During these years the PI gained substantial experience in the field of High-Performance Computing, initially as an awardee of PRACE (Partnership for advanced computing in Europe) peer-reviewed computational grants for computational resources on Tier0 European HPC infrastructures, and successively as a member of the PRACE scientific committee and, quite recently, as a member of the EuroHPC Access Resource Committee. He has been consulted by the CINECA HPC infrastructure for the acquisition of pre-exascale machines.

In the 2013 call, the PI was awarded the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for the project BIC (Cavitation across scales: following Bubble from Inception to Collapse, agreement # 339446–BIC), where multi-scale simulation techniques were conceived and developed to address the elusive problem of bubble nucleation addressed from the fundamental perspective of atomistic simulation to innovative mesoscale techniques. Besides direct application to cavitation, unexpected results dealt with nucleation in nanoscale confinement and intrusion extrusion mechanics in nanoporous materials. The results obtained in the BIC context received attention also from non-specialized media, with TV, radio, and newspaper interviews.

As a follow-up project BIC, the PI obtained funding from the ERC Proof-of-Concept (2017 call) for developing the INVICTUS (IN VItro Cavitation Through UltraSound, proposal  # 779751) platform for the study of cavitation enhanced endothelial permeability. The idea was to realize a standardized platform hosting a living and biologically functional endothelial layer to mimic a blood vessel on a chip, to understand the effect of ultrasound irradiated microbubbles in increasing the endothelial layer permeability in view of target drug delivery, and brain blood barrier opening.