Giulia Spina's homepage

PhD @ Politecnico of Turin

gspina — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 11:51:37 +0000

In Italy it is compulsory to take an exam, both written and oral, in order to be admitted to any PhD. Every faculty has its own exam.

As I successfully passed the exam, ranking first among ten candidates, I am now PhD student at the Politecnico of Turin, at the faculty of Materials Science.

Hurray!

TOEFL 118/120

gspina — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:16:13 +0000

On June 28, 2008 I took a TOEFL Internet-based test.
I scored

reading 30
listening 30
writing 29
speaking 29

total: 118/120

Research in INRS-EMT Montreal

gspina — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:10:24 +0000

since January 2008 I joined the UOP – Ultrafast Optical Processing group at INRS-EMT research centre.
The laboratory facilities are excellent and the group recently expanded, including 3 new post-docs, two of them winners of Marie-Curie fellowships.

My goal by now is to study whether the Korteweg-de Vries (KDV) equation can be physically be retrieved from the nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) equation. The connection between defocusing NLS and KDV has been shown by Zacharov and Kutnesov, in 1986, with a multi-scale expansion.
Defocusing NLS requires normal dispersion media, and it was exactly in such a media that Kivshar proposed, in 1990 and 1991, the anti-kink soliton, a curious solution of NLS due to the connection with KDV.

We now want to understand whether there exist a media which can sustain a KDV-like regime. To this purpose I derived the NLS-KDV connection, taking particular care of the physical coefficients.

Master Thesis

gspina — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:43:43 +0000

I graduated in 2007 – with an excellent grade: 110 summa cum laude /110 – with a Thesis on the Korteweg de Vries (KDV) equation over slowly varying sea bottom. KDV equation describes indeed waves in shallow water as well as othen nonlinear phenomena like waves in plasma or internal water waves.

My work consisted in simple numerical simulations, with fortran as programming language, of the solitary wave propagating over a sinusoidal bottom.

The Korteweg-De Vries (KDV) equation in 2+1 dimensions (2 spatial, 1 temporal) is called Kodomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) equation. Here you can see a nice view of KP waves approaching a beach, where the sea bottom rises gently. As a consequence, the amplitude of the waves increases, a phenomena described by Green's Law.

You might want to download the Master Thesis fulltext (in Italian) or the powerpoint presentation.

I am currently analysing the data obtained together with my former supervisor, Prof. Alfred Osborne.

Miniforschung in Heidelberg

gspina — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:59:31 +0000

In september 2004 I had the opportunity to participate to a mini-research at the Institute for Environmental Physics in Heidelberg within the research group of prof. Kurt Roth.

I performed several experiments on water percolation in porous media within a Hele-Shaw cell. A description of the experiment can be found here.

Prof. Roth wrote a very nice letter describing my contribution and later he and PhD student Fereidoun Rezanezhad included me in the authors of his contribution given at 2005 European Geophysical Union Conference. you can download conference proceeding and poster, if you wish.

Back in Italy I gave a presentation on my experience.

curriculum vitae and extra activities

gspina — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:50:45 +0000

please click here to download my resume

In 2001 I was between the founders of Il Contesto, a student newspaper sponsored by the University of Turin. Il Contesto is a magazine based on interviews, and I had the opportunity to interview several fascinating personalities of italian and international cultural community. Here is a list of my contributions in 2006, related to energy and environmental problems.

G.Bova, H.Delgrosso, G.Spina “Hydrogen Economy” interview to Jeremy Rifkin

G.Bova, H.Delgrosso, G.Spina “Industry and Research on Renewable Energy” interview to Mauro Vignolini, researcher at ENEA (National Research Institute for Energy and Environment)

G.Bova, H.Delgrosso, G.Spina “Sustainable ENEL: present or future?” interview to Roberto Zangrandi, spokesman of ENEL (National Industry for Electrical Power)

T.Brusasco, G.Spina, “Resources in Italy: O Sole Mio” interview to Edo Ronchi, former Minister of Environment

book review: “Collapse” by Jared Diamond