Group

Prof. Paolo Ricci (EPFL card)

Paolo Ricci earned his master’s degree in nuclear engineering at the Politecnico di Torino, Turin (Italy). His doctoral studies were conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with focus on kinetic simulation of magnetic reconnection in the Earth’s magnetotail. He spent two-and-a-half years as a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he worked on gyrokinetic simulations of the Z pinch. In 2006, he joined SPC as a EURATOM fellow, and was named Tenure Track Assistant Professor in June 2010.  He is at the head of the SPC theory group.

Paola Paruta, PhD Student (EPFL card)

Paola Paruta graduated in Mathematical Engeneering at Politecnico di Milano. She followed part of her graduate studies at TU Eindhoven (NL) and she concluded her Master thesis at KU Leuven (BE), focusing on the study of dust particle interaction in interstellar clouds. In September 2014 she started her doctoral studies at SPC, with the aim of developing the numerical techniques necessary to simulate plasma turbulence in a diverted scrape-off layer geometry.

Rogério Jorge (EPFL card)

Rogério Jorge graduated in Engineering Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. His Master thesis focused on the analysis of the turbulent regimes in the Scrape-off Layer (SOL) of the ISTTOK tokamak device at Lisbon, using the GBS code developed at EPFL.

For the PhD, he is currently developing a model applicable to the SOL for arbitrary collisionalities. Although the SOL itself has usually low temperatures (compared with the tokamak’s core), certain phenomena in the SOL (such as the presence of ELMs) require the use of lower collisionality regimes.

André Coroado (EPFL card)

André Coroado graduated in Engineering Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, where he carried out his master thesis project on analytical studies of energetic particle resonances in tokamaks. In March 2017 he started his doctoral studies at SPC aiming to achieve further understanding on the influence of the neutrals on SOL plasma turbulence. His main goal is to understand the plasma fueling based on simulations with the fluid plasma turbulence code GBS.

Maurizio Giacomin (EPFL card)

Maurizio Giacomin graduated in Physics at University of Padua, carrying out his master thesis project at Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik (IPP) in Garching (Munich) on the topic of collisional radiative models applied to negative ion sources for fusion. In November 2017, he started his PhD studies at SPC, focusing on the implementation and simulation of a kinetic neutrals model for a diverted scrape-off layer geometry.