Luca SARNO | Curriculum

Dr. Luca Sarno is Assistant Professor of Hydraulic Engineering at the Department of Civil Engineering (DICIV) of the University of Salerno (UNISA). He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in hydraulic engineering, hydraulic risk and multi-risk management.

In 2020 he achieved the Italian National Scientific Habilitation (ASN) for Associate Professorship in the fields of Hydraulics, Hydrology, Hydraulic and Maritime Engineering.
He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees with honors in Environmental Engineering (major in Hydrogeological Risk) from the University of Naples Federico II. Subsequently, in 2013 he received a Ph.D. in Hydraulic Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II, where his Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Depth-averaged models for dry granular flows”, was awarded a special mention from the Italian Society of Hydraulics (Gii).
In 2018 he was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (H2020-MSCA-IF) with the research project “StratifiedGRANULAR”, which was carried out at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany) and focused on modelling rheologically stratified granular flows by a multi-layer depth-averaged approach. After a few appointments as a Research Assistant at the University of Salerno, from 2019 to 2022 he was Researcher at the Institute of Fluid Dynamics (FDY) of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Moreover, he was Visiting Research Scholar and Invited Lecturer at several research institutes, including the Department of Hydraulic and Ocean Engineering of the National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan), the Ujigawa Open Laboratory of the Kyoto University (Japan), the Research & Development Center of the Nippon Koei Co. (Japan), the Laboratory of Hydraulics of the University of Trento (Italy), the Research Centre for Applied Sciences of the Academia Sinica (Taiwan).

His scientific interests, evidenced by several papers published in international journals and conference proceedings, are mainly in physical-mathematical modelling and experimental investigation, at laboratory and field scales, of free surface flows and granular flows, with applications also focused on the assessment of hydraulic and debris flow hazards and on the mitigation of the related risks.

He is currently local PI for the University of Salerno in the NextGenerationEU project “RETURN”, multi-Risk sciEnce for resilienT commUnities undeR a changiNg climate, Spoke VS1 Water, on the topic of monitoring and modelling hydrological-hydraulic-geomorphological processes in small watersheds. Moreover, he is a member of the research unit of the University of Salerno in the PRIN research project “DebrisPHOS”, Debris flow monitoring by photonic sensors: new frontiers of DAS technology.

As a faculty member of DICIV, he attends the meetings of the Council of the Department of Civil Engineering and those of the Teaching Council of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. He serves as a member of the Teaching Quality Assurance Panel (GAQD), of the Quality Assurance Monitoring and Analysis Panel, and of the Teaching Committee. Moreover, he is an elected member of the DICIV Department Board.

He is a fellow of the Italian Society of Hydraulics, of the International Association of Laser Velocimetry and of the Marie Curie Alumni Association.