Clarissa ASTUTO

Clarissa Astuto is a fixed-term Assistant Professor (RTD-A) at the University of Catania, in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Her research focuses on asymptotic-preserving numerical schemes, multiscale modeling, finite differences and {finite element methods}, with applications in biological network formation, sorption kinetics, and high-order numerical approximations for PDEs.

She earned her PhD in Mathematics and Computational Sciences from the University of Catania in 2021, under the supervision of Prof. Giovanni Russo and with the additional title of Doctor Europaeus, with a dissertation titled Multiscale Modeling and Numerics of Sorption Kinetics. During her PhD, she conducted research visits at Oxford Brookes University and the University of Rennes, where she worked on numerical methods for PDEs in complex domains and time-multiscale modeling of fluid-structure interactions.

Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral researcher at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) for three years (2021-2024) under the mentorship of  Prof. Daniele Boffi. Her work at KAUST contributed to the development of ghost-nodal finite element methods and efficient numerical solvers for elliptic-parabolic systems.

Throughout her career, she has been an active participant in international research collaborations and conferences such as ICIAM (Tokyo), HYP (Shanghai), and AfriComp (Cape Town), and delivering invited talks at institutions including the University of L’Aquila and KAUST’s SIAM Chapter. She has also co-organized a minisymposium on pattern formation in life sciences at the upcoming SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems (2025).