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Enrico Milanese

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Postdoctoral Fellow

Expertise: friction, fault mechanics, solid mechanics, computational mechanics, fractal analysis
 
 
About Me Publications
Enrico is strongly interested in frictional processes at all scales, and in particular in the role played by surface roughness and wear/gouge evolution of the sliding bodies.

He carried out his PhD studies at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland). There, he used numerical simulations to investigate surface roughness evolution in adhesive wear processes at the nanoscale. In particular, he showed the importance of deformation mechanisms and wear particles in the evolution of the surface geometry to the observed fractal description, and he investigated the interplay of surface roughness, interfacial adhesion, and minimum wear particle size.

Interested in the applications of friction and fracture to geomechanics, he joined MIT Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Department after earning a Postdoc Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Here, he is studying the mechanics of off-fault fractures that developed during the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence.

Enrico is also active in science communication with film. Here his interests lie in creating safe spaces for scientists and filmmakers to tell their science stories (as a lecturer and event organizer), and in making science films (as a filmmaker and scientific advisor). He is the co-founder of SciFilmIt, an association that organize science filmmaking events for scientists and artists, adults and kids.