Mobility in Europe – Perspectives from EU’s Marie Curie Programme

Dr. Alessandro Gabbana (29) currently holds a post-doc position in the group of computational theoretical physics lead by Prof. Raffaele Tripiccione, at University of Ferrara (Italy). Alessandro’s research focuses in the field of relativistic hydrodynamics and in particular in the development of efficient numerical methods, which find application both at large scales, in the realm of astrophysics, down to atomic scales (e.g., in the study of the electron properties of graphene in effective 2D systems) and further down to subnuclear scales, in the realm of quark-gluon plasmas. Alessandro studied computer science at University of Ferrara and received his bachelor degree in 2013. Afterwards, he enrolled in a master degree in computational science and engineering at Umeå University (Sweden). He graduated in 2015 with a thesis work based on the implementation and optimization and of Lattice Boltzmann codes on GPU clusters.

Thanks to his interdisciplinary background, Alessandro qualified for a ESR position within the HPC-LEAP project  (High Performance Computing in Life science, Engineering And Physics, 2015-2019). The project offered 15 PhD Marie-Sklodwska Curie fellowships for cross-disciplinary research in Lattice QCD, Turbulent and complex flows, Computational Biology, Modelling and algorithms and HPC architectures and technologies.

HPC-LEAP consisted of a European joint doctorate program and was realized by bringing together world-leading experts in applied mathematics, high performance computing technologies, particle and nuclear physics, fluid dynamics and life sciences to appropriately train researchers in Europe to exploit high performance computing, advance science and promote innovation.

In 2019, he received his PhD-degree for his thesis on ‘Lattice Boltzmann Methods for Fluid-Dynamics in Relativistic Regimes’ with highest honours (‘summa cum laude’). The degree was awarded from both institutions University of Ferrara and University of Wuppertal (Cotutelle) under the mentoring of Prof. Raffaele Tripiccione, PD Dr. Andreas Bartel and Prof. Matthias Ehrhardt. For this PhD-thesis, he received the FABU price for the best PhD work in 2019 at the University of Wuppertal, as well as the best thesis award within the physics department at University of Ferrara.

Furthermore, Alessandro was invited to participate at the 70th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting to exchange ideas among scientists of various disciplines, different generations, different cultures, in order to discuss ideas with Nobel prize winners. Unfortunately, due to the corona-virus crisis, this meeting is now postponed to 2021.

Andreas Bartel