Luigi Martinelli

Martinelli completed his undergraduate studies in aeronautical engineering at the Politecnico di Milano and earned his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1987. He remained at Princeton as a Research Staff member to continue the development of computational fluid dynamics methods in collaboration with his former Ph.D. adviser Antony Jameson, at a time in which the MAE department was one of the worldwide leading centers in the field. He joined the faculty in 1994, and has been teaching courses in Aerodynamics, Applied and Computational Mathematics, and Design. 

Martinelli’s research is primarily motivated by the desire of improving the aerodynamics efficiency of airplanes, cars, ships, and energy conversion devices, and is concerned with a variety of fundamental problems at the intersection of aerodynamics, computational science and engineering design. He contributed to the development of fast multigrid methods for the solution of viscous conservation laws in both compressible and incompressible regime. He also made noted contributions to the development of efficient shape design optimization methods based on the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations, which have been widely used in Industry for the aerodynamic design of contemporary transonic airplanes. Martinelli received the 2003 Graduate Mentoring Award from the McGraw Center at Princeton University, and enjoys coding the next generation of CFD solvers.