Career highlights
1984-1988 | Fulbright Fellow, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA |
1988-1997 | Premier Assistant et Chargé deCours, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland |
1997-2003 | Professor, Université Paul Sabatier, IMFT, Toulouse, France |
2003-present | Professor, Università di Genova, DICCA, Genova, Italy |
After
graduating cum
laude
in
Mechanical Engineering from the
University of Genova
with a Laurea
thesis on the thermal instabilities developing in the heat exchanger of
a fast breeder experimental nuclear reactor (research carried out at
the ANSALDO-NIRA company, under the joint supervision of Dr. A. Donati
and
Prof. G. Guglielmini), Alessandro Bottaro spent a year as a soldier in
the Italian mountain troops, and then joined the Department of Mechanical and
Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers
University,
New Jersey, with a
Fulbright fellowship. There, he
pursued numerical research on natural and mixed convection in
three-dimensional cylindrical geometries, advised by Prof.
A. Zebib. This work led him to his doctorate degree, obtained in 1988,
after having been elected in 1987 "the Rutgers MAE graduate student
with most
scholarship and promise". Shortly afterward, Alessandro Bottaro joined
the Hydraulic Machines and Fluids
Mechanics
Institute
at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Lausanne,
Switzerland, directed by the late Prof. I.L. Ryhming, and started
numerical work on the generation of structured grids for the simulation
of flows in hydraulic turbines, and on the mixing processes in chemical
reactors, activities sponsored by the Swiss pharmaceutical and
hydraulic-machines industries. He also started lecturing to senior
undergraduate
and graduate students on general fluid mechanics, hydrodynamic
instabilities, fluid mixing and
turbulence. Later research carried out in Switzerland dealt with the
effect
of centrifugal and Coriolis forces on flow instabilities in boundary
layers and channels. Most notable is the study on the receptivity of
Goertler vortices conducted in collaboration with Prof. P. Luchini,
based on an inverse approach that requires the backward-in-time
integration of the adjoint stability equations. In 1997, Alessandro
Bottaro was appointed Professor at the Department of Mechanics of the University Paul Sabatier
in
Toulouse,
France. There, he gave classes to undergraduate and graduate students
on general mechanics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, waves in fluids,
stability, transition and turbulence, numerical methods in fluid
mechanics, and
flow receptivity/control. He also carried out research
activities at the Fluid Mechanics
Institute of Toulouse,
leading a group of twelve to fifteen researchers working on topics
ranging from flow instabilities,
to receptivity, coherent structures and optimal/robust control of
transition. In 2002 he was
appointed as coordinator of the Fluid Mechanics and Energy unit of the
French CNRT on Aeronautics and Space.
During his tenure at the
University of Toulouse Alessandro Bottaro also co-organized a number of
specialised workshops and large scale
conferences, sat in the Scientific Committee of several
international meetings, and delivered some thirty invited
seminars at conferences, summer-schools and research laboratories
throughout the world. He has held European union grants in the
Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Framework Programmes (ALTTA,
WAVES, RECEPT, FLUBIO, REDWING, TTT, COT) and a number of contracts with
science-sponsoring organisations and industries (Airbus,
Siemens, Ansaldo Energia, Oto Melara, GreenProject, Selex Galileo MUAS). He
routinely referees papers submitted for publication to fluid dynamics
journals, such as the
Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Physics of Fluids, AIAA Journal, etc.
In 2003 he was
appointed Full Professor at the University of Genova for "Chiara Fama" ("Clear Renown"),
in the framework of an Italian National Programme aimed at
counteracting brain drain. He is since with the Department of Civil, Chemical and Environmental
Engineering,
lecturing on fluid mechanics and continuum mechanics, and has geared
his most recent research activity toward the study of biological
systems, such
as the hydrodynamics of beating cilia or the optimization of the
propulsion characteristics of flapping foils through kinematic control.
Recently, he has been
appointed 'expert' with the European Union, and at the French Ministry of Education and Research
within the Mission Scientifique, Technique et Pédagogique, DSPT8. From September 2007
to September 2011 he has been President of the Scientific Council of the French Foundation on Aerospace
Science and Engineering
(RTRA-STAE).
At present he sits in the Scientific and Technical Committee of the
Ligurian District on Sea Technologies (DLTM), based in La Spezia.
In November 2011 he has been drafted into the
ANVUR evaluation panel
(ANVUR is the national agency for the evaluation of
universities and research institutes) to assess Italian research output in the fields of industrial engineering and computer science for the period 2004-2010.
He has been awarded the
Edoardo Kramer prize
in 2013 from the
Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e Lettere,
as the "Italian engineer with significant contributions
to fluid dynamics and turbulence". In 2014 he has been granted a
Chaire d'Attractivité from the
Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse,
in the frame of the
French IDEX (Initiative d'Excellence) program, to conduct research in fluid mechanics and biomimetics at the
Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse
for the period 2015-2019. From 2016 to 2019 Alessandro Bottaro has presided over the Scientific Council of the Marseille-based
Labex ("Laboratoire d'Excellence") Mécanique et Complexité.
His research has featured on Le Scienze and Sapere (Italian science journals), and on the New Scientist, Conservation Magazine, The Economist, Lava Magazine,
and other science divulgation magazines and web sites. He is the author of eighty refereed journal publications, two thirds of which in either the
Journal of Fluid Mechanics or
Physics of Fluids,
and one patent. He serves as Associate Editor for
Meccanica since 2011, and for the
European Journal of Mechanics - B/Fluids since 2019.
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