Francesco Ballarin

Affiliation

Associate Professor of Numerical Analysis at the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.

Research interests

Numerical analysis
Reduced order modelling
Computational fluid dynamics
Open-source software development

Contact

 Francesco Ballarin
 Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
 Department of Mathematics and Physics, via Garzetta 48, I-25133 Brescia, Italy
 Department of Mathematics for Economic, Financial and Actuarial Sciences, via Necchi 9, I-20123 Milano, Italy
 francesco.ballarin@unicatt.it

Highlights

I was appointed director of MATHEX, the research center of Università Cattolica on applications of mathematics and computer science (May 2025).

New preprint on glioblastoma growth by means of reduced order models based on AI, by D. Cerrone, D. Riccobelli, P. Vitullo, F. Ballarin, J. Falco, F. Acerbi, A. Manzoni, P. Zunino, P. Ciarletta (December 2024).

New preprint on variational multiscale evolve and filter models for convection dominated flows, by M. Strazzullo, F. Ballarin, T. Iliescu, T. Chacón Rebollo (November 2024).

New preprint on unsteady optimal control problems for cardiovascular flows, by S. Rathore, P. C. Africa, F. Ballarin, F. Pichi, M. Girfoglio, G. Rozza (October 2024).

New preprint on a priori error bounds for the approximate deconvolution Leray ROM in fluid dynamics, by I. Moore, A. Sanfilippo, F. Ballarin, T. Iliescu (October 2024).

I was appointed vice-director of the Seminario Matematico di Brescia (September 2024).

New preprint on a priori error bounds for reduced order models based on proper orthogonal decomposition for applications in fluid dynamics, by F. Ballarin and T. Iliescu (September 2024).

Software

Lead developer of RBniCS - reduced order modelling in FEniCS, 2015-ongoing.
Lead developer of multiphenics/multiphenicsx - easy prototyping of multiphysics problems in FEniCS/FEniCSx, 2016-ongoing.
Lead developer of FEMlium - interactive visualization of finite element simulations on geographic maps with folium, 2021-ongoing.
Lead developer of FEM on Colab/FEM on Kaggle, 2021-ongoing.
Lead developer of viskex - interactive visualization for firedrake and FEniCSx, 2023-ongoing.

Publications

Donato Cerrone, Davide Riccobelli, Sara Gazzoni, Piermario Vitullo, Francesco Ballarin, Jacopo Falco, Francesco Acerbi, Andrea Manzoni, Paolo Zunino, and Pasquale Ciarletta. Patient-specific prediction of glioblastoma growth via reduced order modeling and neural networks. Mathematical Biosciences, 387:109468, 2025. arXiv:2412.05330, doi:10.1016/j.mbs.2025.109468.
Maria Strazzullo, Francesco Ballarin, Traian Iliescu, and Tomás Chacón Rebollo. Variational multiscale evolve and filter strategies for convection-dominated flows. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 438:117811, 2025. arXiv:2411.13957, doi:10.1016/j.cma.2025.117811.
Surabhi Rathore, Pasquale C. Africa, Francesco Ballarin, Federico Pichi, Michele Girfoglio, and Gianluigi Rozza. Projection-based reduced order modelling for unsteady parametrized optimal control problems in 3d cardiovascular flows. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, 269:108813, 2025. arXiv:2410.20828, doi:10.1016/j.cmpb.2025.108813.

Teaching

Lecturer for course on “Elements of numerical analysis”. Master degree in Mathematics, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy (Spring 2025).
Lecturer for course on “Interdisciplinarity in science”. Post-graduate A28 program for middle school teachers, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy (Spring 2025).
Lecturer for course on “Computational fluid dynamics”. Master degree in Mathematics, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy (Fall 2024).
Lecturer for course on “Numerical analysis”. Bachelor degree in Mathematics, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy (Fall 2024 + Spring 2025).

Students

Advisor in the Ph.D. thesis of Anna Sanfilippo, “Regularization Techniques for Reduced Order Models in Convection-Dominated Flows”. Ph.D. in Mathematics, Università di Trento, Italy (Apr. 2025).
Advisor in the master thesis of Giuseppe Cardinale, “Scalable Recommendation Systems with Amazon Data”. Master degree in Statistical and Actuarial Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy (Mar. 2025).
Advisor in the master thesis of Anuja Saira Abraham, “Skin Cancer Prediction: A comparative analysis of CNN, VGG, AlexNet and ResNet Deep Learning models”. Master degree in Data Analytics for Business, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy (Feb. 2025).

Events

Organizing committee, FEniCS 2025, Groningen, The Netherlands (18-20 Jun. 2025).
Talk in a minisymposium, XII International Conference on Adaptive Modeling and Simulation ADMOS 2025, Barcelona, Spain (9-11 Jun. 2025).
Minisymposium organizer, XII International Conference on Adaptive Modeling and Simulation ADMOS 2025, Barcelona, Spain (9-11 Jun. 2025).
Organizing committee, YoungPeople4Math 2025, Brescia, Italy (20 May 2025).

Projects

Member and unit leader of “ROMEU: Reduced Order Models for Environmental and Urban flows”, PRIN 2022 PNRR, 2023-2025.
Member of “Mathematical models for viscoelastic biological matter”, PRIN 2022, 2023-2025.
Member of “Metodi numerici per lo studio di strutture geometriche parametriche complesse”, INdAM GNCS 2023, 2023.
Member and unit leader of “ARIA: Accurate ROMs for Industrial Applications”, MSCA-RISE-2019, 2022-2024.