Dr. Dominique Fratantonio

I obtained my bachelor in Aerospace Engineering and my master of philosophy in Aeronautical engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. My master dissertation, supervised by Prof. Franco Auteri, is about a global linear stability analysis of the effect of superhydrophobic coatings on the Von-Karman instability of the fluid flow around a cylinder.

During my master degree, I participated on an exchange student program at the University of Maryland, where I worked with Dr. Roberto Celi on helicopter aerodynamics and with Prof. James Baeder on graphic cards parallel computing with CUDA/C++ for implementing implicit time marching methods on 2D Euler compressible equations.

Afterwards, I pursued a Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Stephane Colin and Dr. Marcos Rojas-Cardenas at the Institut Nationale des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) de Toulouse, France, on the development of molecular tagging velocimetry (MTV) for the analysis of rarefied gas flows in channels and on the characterization of photoluminescence properties of ketones.

Currently, I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Extreme Fluid Team (P-23, Physics Division), led by Dr. John Charonko, on the experimental characterization of variable-density turbulent jets and on the implementation of MTV on the Horizontal Shock Tube.

My areas of expertise are computational fluid dynamics (CFD), laser-based diagnostic techniques, molecular dynamics, and photo-chemistry.

My current hobbies are card magic, playing the guitar, snowboarding and working with electronics.