Chiara Montagna

I am a researcher at the INGV, a public research and monitoring institution in charge of all things environmental in Italy. My work focuses on the physics of volcanic processes: I study how magmas move within volcanoes' feeding systems, and how this dynamics relates to geophysical anche geochemical observables such as seismicity, ground deformation and gas emissions measured at the Earth surface.

I am a physicist by background: I hold a BSc, an MSc and a PhD in Physics from the University of Pisa, on variuos subjects related to plasma physics. My studies provided me with a strong knowledge of fluid dynamics as well as statistical mechanics, which I can now apply to understand the physics of volcanic systems.

I make strong use of high-performance-computing for my research. I perform numerical simulations to solve the multi-phase, multi-component equations of fluid dynamics of magmatic systems, characterized by non-ideal equations of state and mixture properties. I use in-house parallel codes that I have contributed to developing; I program in C++ and Fortran, and more recently I started using OpenFOAM, a powerful and versatile open-source CFD platform. I also enjoy analytical modeling, which I find very useful in order to get a first-order glimpse on how the investigated processes evolve.