Pete J. Diamessis

Biography

Peter Diamessis joined the CEE faculty in January 2006. He received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece in 1995. As a student at NTUA, he was an active member of the environmentalist student group. He worked for a year as a research assistant at the Computational Fluid Dynamics laboratory at NTUA focusing on the development of a multifractal cascade model for fluid turbulence.

From 1996 to 2001, he pursued graduate studies at the Mechanical and Aerospace Department (formerly Applied Mechanics and Engineering Sciences Dept.) of the University of California, San Diego. Following extensive coursework in fluid dynamics and physical oceanography, his PhD thesis concentrated on using direct numerical simulations of stratified homogeneous turbulence to better understand ocean microstructure measurements.

Upon receiving his PhD, he became a postdoctoral researcher in the fluid dynamics group at the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California. His postdoc work focused on the development and implementation of numerically stable spectral multidomain techniques and the numerical investigation of stably stratified turbulent wakes and instabilities under internal solitary waves.

Research Interests

Peter Diamessis's research at Cornell is focused along two main themes. One is the development of high-accuracy and high-resolution spectral quadrilateral subdomain penalty techniques for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations which enable as realistic as possible an approximation to the environmental flow processes of interest. The other consists of using these techniques as the driver of highly parallel simulations which provide an accurate description of the relevant physical phenomena over as broad a range and separation of scales and as long a duration as possible. One group of phenomena of primary interest are high Reynolds number localized stratified turbulence and its remote and subsurface signature, as driven by the radiated internal wave field and its interaction with currents and sharp variations in the ambient density profile and the near-surface region of the ocean. The other area of physical interest is the study of instabilities and turbulence in the interior and under internal solitary waves propagating in environments of variable depth and stratification and currents and the associated impact on particle dynamics. Research topics include: Environmental fluid mechanics (turbulence, mixing, internal waves in the open/coastal ocean and in lakes), direct numerical simulation and large eddy simulation of stratified flows, modeling turbulence/turbulent mixing in geophysical flows, hydrodynamic instability theory, interaction of hydrodynamics and biology in natural ecosystems, computational engineering, numerical analysis, stable high accuracy spectral/spectral multidomain computational methods for high Reynolds number flows in complex geometries, high performance parallel scientific computing, scientific visualization.

• Computational Fluid Dynamics
• Theory of Computation
• Scientific Computing
• Complex Systems, Network Science and Computation
• Fluid Dynamics and Rheology
• Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology
• Water Systems