Felice Arena

Felice Arena (male) is Vice-Rector and Professor of Ocean Engineering at the ‘Mediterranea’ University of Reggio Calabria (Italy). He is also Director of the Natural Ocean Engineering Laboratory – NOEL (www.noel.unirc.it). Fields of interest of his research activity include: mechanics and statistics of ocean waves; offshore engineering; wave energy converters; wind energy offshore.
He has published more than 300 papers in international journals (including ‘Journal of Geophysical Research’, ‘Journal of Physical Oceanography’, ‘Journal of Fluid Mechanics’, ‘Energy’, ‘Philosophical Transactions A of the Royal Society of London’, ‘Renewable Energy’, ‘Earth-Science Reviews’, ‘Energy Research & Social Science’, ‘Coastal Engineering’, ‘Marine Structures’, ’Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences’, ‘Nonlinear Dynamics’, ‘Ocean Modelling’, ‘Physics of Fluids’, ‘International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics’, ‘European Journal of Mechanics – B/Fluids’, ‘Probabilistic Engineering Mechanics’, ‘Ocean Engineering’, ASCE ‘Journal of Engineering Mechanics’, ASME ‘Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering’, ‘Applied Ocean Research’, ASCE ‘Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering’, ‘Acta Mechanica’, ‘International Journal of Mechanical Sciences’), books and conference proceedings. He has advised over one hundred undergraduate and MS graduate students. He was mentoring of 20 graduated PhD students and has been advising 3 PhD students in “Sustainable Development and Climate change”, national PhD program coordinated by School for Advanced Studies IUSS of Pavia. Then he was mentoring of 12 Post-Doc students.
Since 2019 he is in the SAC – Scientific Advisory Committee – of Irish center MaREI (Energy, Climate, Marine), for the area ‘Marine Renewable Energy Technologies’ (up to 2025).
He is Member of the Scientific Committee for the Structures. Safety And Reliability Symposium at the “Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering (OOAE) Division” by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers ASME. He has served in the scientific committees of many national and international conferences.
He was Senior Member, in PIANC, of the Working Group “Renewable Energy for Maritime Ports” (159), between 2012 and 2019.
Since March 2009 he is the Director of the NOEL laboratory, for small scale field experiments. The lab was founded by Paolo Boccotti, of the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, and it is located by the seashore of Reggio Calabria.
He is: in the Editorial Board of “Probabilistic Engineering Mechanics”, Elsevie; Associate Editor of Springer “Journal of Ocean Engineering and Marine Energy”,; Specialty Chief Editor in “Wave and Tidal Energy” in “FRONTIERS in Energy Research”; in the EB of “Journal of Marine Science and Engineering”.
He was Associate Editor of “ASME JOMAE” in 2018-2023.
He won the “OMAE 2011 SSR Best paper Award”, by American Society of Mechanical Engineers ASME (USA), OOAE, for the paper “Space-Time Extremes in Sea Storms” written with F. Fedele (GeorgiaTech, USA) and M.A. Tayfun (Kuwait University).
He has been scientific supervisor (principal investigator) of many Italian and international projects (for a whole amount of more than 30 million of euros, on offshore engineering and marine energy. In particular: he was scientific supervisor of project PLENOSE, supported by Marie Curie action FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IRSES (duration 2014-2018); he was scientific coordinator of the European Project REWEC 3 – 2013-IT-92050-S, supported by the EU’s TEN-T Programme, on the wave energy exploitation in the Port of Civitavecchia; he has been leading the UNIRC unit in the Horizon 2020 project with acronym “The Blue Growth Farm”, supported within the call H2020-BG-2017-1 (activity: BG-04). Duration of the project: 2018-2022. For details see www.noel.unirc.it.
He founded WAVENERGY.IT, which is a limited company established for developing devices for producing electrical power from oceans (www.wavenergy.it); the company is a Spin Off of the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria (Italy). For this Spin-Off, F. Arena is Scientific Supervisor: (i) of the Civitavecchia Project, an Italian port in which a 650m breakwater with a REWEC3 device; (ii) of the Salerno Port project, for a 200m long REWEC3 breakwater; projects are related to the building of Wave Energy Converters.
Since 2003 he is a member of the High Counsel of Public Works, in Rome (Italy), at the Department of Public Works. Here he reviewed a large number of projects concerning harbours projects in Italy.
Since 2023 he is member of the National Commission for Forecasting and Preventing Major Risks (Rome, Italy), which is the connecting structure between the National Service of Civil Protection and the scientific Community, in Italy.
Selected, for his career activity, in the ‘World’s Top 2% Scientists List’ produced by Stanford University (USA) in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, as one of the world’s leading experts in the field of marine engineering.