Assistant Professor Marco Giometto was recently invited to join the Amazon Visiting Academics (AVA) program. He will contribute its expertise in computational fluid dynamics to improve flight dynamics of package delivery drones as part of the Amazon Prime Air project.
The AVA program is aimed at pre-tenure to newly-tenured academics who seek to apply research methods to tackle complex technical challenges while continuing their university work. Amazon’s scale allows Visiting Academics the opportunity to dive deep and innovate. Through the program, Visiting Academics have the ability to work with Amazon on a part-time basis — toggling between part-time or joining Amazon full-time while on sabbatical.
Marco Giometto focuses on the fundamentals of turbulence, and its impact on the transport of mass, energy, and momentum in engineering and environmental systems.
Insights from his research have implications in geophysics, engineering, biology, and energy technologies, where heat and mass transfer, evaporation, and skin friction often determine system performance or environmental impact.
He develops and uses high-fidelity computational techniques along with analytical tools to gain insight into complex flow systems, and to formulate reduced-order models for use in interdisciplinary applications. Topics of interest include boundary-layer turbulence, turbulent transport in flows over and within complex surfaces (e.g. urban and vegetation canopies), and the use of uncertainty quantification and artificial intelligence techniques for turbulence modeling.
Dr. Giometto received his BS and MS degrees in civil engineering from the University of Padua (2010), and a joint PhD in civil and environmental engineering from Braunschweig TU University and the University of Florence (2014). In 2016 he earned a second PhD in mechanical engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he won the EDME Award for the best thesis in mechanical engineering. Before joining Columbia University in 2018, he held postdoctoral positions at the University of British Columbia and at the Center for Turbulence Research, which is jointly operated by Stanford University and NASA Ames.
