Annalisa Buffa


Annalisa Buffa is an Italian mathematician, specializing in numerical analysis and PDEs.

Education and career

Buffa received her master's degree in computer engineering in 1996 and in 2000 her Ph.D., with supervisor Franco Brezzi, from the University of Milan with thesis Some numerical and theoretical problems in computational electromagnetism. She was from 2001 to 2004 a Researcher, from 2004 to 2013 a Research Director, and from 2013 to 2016 she was the Director at the Istituto di matematica applicata e tecnologie informatiche "E. Magenes" of the CNR in Pavia. From 2016 to present she is Professor of Mathematics and holds the Chair of Numerical Modeling and Simulation at EPFL.
She has been a visiting scholar at many institutions, including the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions at the University of Paris VI, the École Polytechnique, the ETH Zürich, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Contributions

Buffa's research deals with a wide range of topics in PDEs and numerical analysis: "isogeometric analysis, fully compatible discretization of PDEs, linear and non linear elasticity, contact mechanics, integral equations on non-smooth manifolds, functional theory for Maxwell equations in non-smooth domains, finite element techniques for Maxwell equations, non-conforming domain decomposition methods, asymptotic analysis, stabilization techniques for finite element discretizations."

Recognition

Buffa was awarded in 2007 the Bartolozzi Prize and in 2015 the Collatz Prize "for her spectacular use of deep and sophisticated mathematical concepts to obtain outstanding contributions to the development of computer simulations in science and industry". In 2014 she was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul with talk Spline differential forms. In 2008 she received an ERC Starting Grant and in 2016 an ERC Advanced Grant.