Rate My Professor Pete Diamessis

Peter J. Diamessis, known as Pete Diamessis, is a Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering within Cornell University's College of Engineering. He joined the faculty in January 2006 after earning his Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego in 2001. As an undergraduate at NTUA, he participated actively in the environmentalist student group and served as a research assistant in the Computational Fluid Dynamics laboratory, developing a multifractal cascade model for fluid turbulence. His doctoral thesis utilized direct numerical simulations of stratified homogeneous turbulence to interpret ocean microstructure measurements. Subsequently, as a postdoctoral researcher in the fluid dynamics group at the University of Southern California's Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department, he developed and implemented numerically stable spectral multidomain techniques and conducted numerical investigations of stably stratified turbulent wakes and instabilities under internal solitary waves.

Diamessis's research interests in Engineering include environmental fluid mechanics, hydrodynamics of the coastal and open ocean and lakes, turbulence modeling, hydrodynamic instability theory, spectral methods in scientific and engineering computation, and high-performance parallel scientific computing. His work features the development of high-accuracy spectral quadrilateral subdomain penalty techniques for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, highly parallel simulations of physical phenomena across broad scales, high Reynolds number localized stratified turbulence and its subsurface signatures driven by radiated internal wave fields, and instabilities and turbulence under internal solitary waves in variable depth, stratification, and currents with impacts on particle dynamics. Key publications encompass "Surface manifestation of internal waves emitted by submerged localized stratified turbulence" (Zhou and Diamessis, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2016), "Turbulent/non-turbulent interfaces in wakes in stably stratified fluids" (Watanabe et al., Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2016), "Two-dimensional instability of the bottom boundary layer under a solitary wave" (Sadek et al., Physics of Fluids, 2015), and "A post-processing technique for stabilizing the discontinuous pressure projection operator in marginally-resolved incompressible inviscid flow" (Joshi et al., Computers & Fluids, 2016). He has received the National Science Foundation Division of Ocean Sciences CAREER Award (2009), Michael Tien '72 Award for Excellence in Teaching (2015), Daniel M. Lazar ’29 Excellence in Teaching Award (2010), James M. and Marsha D. McCormick Award for Excellence in Advising (2008), 2016 Department of Defense High Performance Computing Success Story Award, Powell Graduate Fellowship (1996), and Blasker Graduate Fellowship for Excellence in Environmental Engineering (2000).