Robert A. Dalrymple
Since 2017, Dr. Robert A. Dalrymple has been the Distinguished Professor of Coastal Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. His research has been in the field of coastal engineering, including water waves and their impact on shorelines, structures, and the ocean bottom; and natural hazards, such as rip currents and tsunamis.
He began working on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) in 2000, while looking for a numerical model that could accurately simulate breaking waves on a beach. By 2003, he and Dr. Omar Knio (both of Johns Hopkins University at the time) published their first paper on breaking waves in a wave tank (Dalrymple, R.A. and O. Knio, “SPH Modelling of Water Waves,” Proc. Coastal Dynamics 2001, ASCE, 779-787, Lund, Sweden, 2001.) Later Dr. Moncho Gómez Gesteira (U. Vigo) and Dr. Ben Rogers (now U. Manchester) joined the effort. Finally in 2007 they produced an open-source code for free surface flows: SPHysics. Later he left the SPHysics group (which went successfully on with DualSPHysics) to join the GPUSPH code group (initiated by Alexis Hérault and managed by the ATHOS Consortium). During this time, he, his students, and colleagues have written more than 30 papers on the subject of SPH and its applications.
He received his degrees from Dartmouth College (A.B., 1967), University of Hawaii (MS., 1968) and University of Florida (Ph.D., 1973).
Vito Zago
Dr. Vito Zago is a Post-Doctoral Researcher, who arrived at Northwestern University in 2019.
His research interest is in computational dynamics focusing on the SPH method for the simulation and study of fluid-solid interaction and complex fluids. His main contributions concern the numerical stability of the SPH method in applications to stiff equations, as in the case of highly-viscous fluids, including the development of specific integration schemes, and the implementation of mechanical and thermal boundary condition models.
He received his degrees (Bachelors Degree, 2013, Masters, 2015) from University of Catania, Italy, where he received, in conjunction with the Istituto Nazionale of Geofisica and Vulcanologia, his Ph.D. in 2019.
