Ignazio Ciufolini (born 1951) is an
Italian physicist active in the field of
gravitational physics and
general relativity
General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. ...
.
Biography
Ignazio Ciufolini graduated magna cum laude in 1980 at Sapienza University of Rome, and received a
PhD PHD or PhD may refer to:
* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
Entertainment
* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
* ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic
* Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group
** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...
in Physics in 1984 at the
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
.
From 1982 to 1988 he worked at University of Texas at Austin as a teaching assistant, lecturer and research associate. He is now an Associate Professor of General Physics at
University of Salento (Italy), tenured since 1999, and a member of Centro Fermi, Rome. He collaborated with John Archibald Wheeler in 1995 to write ''Gravitation and Inertia'', for which they won the
PROSE Award for the best professional and scholar book in physics and astronomy. He works mainly in the field of General Relativity and Gravitational Physics, proposing a method to measure the effects of
gravitomagnetism using the data from the
laser ranged satellites
LAGEOS and LAGEOS-2.
[
] He was featured on the cover of the September 6, 2007 issue of Nature, dedicated to his review paper on Dragging of Inertial Frames and General Relativity.
[ He is the Principal Investigator for the Italian Space Agency ( ASI) of the Laser Relativity Satellite ( LARES) mission, a space mission aimed to improve the accuracy of the measurement of frame-dragging.
In 2010 he won the Giuseppe Occhialini Medal and Prize, jointly awarded by the Italian Physical Society and the Institute of Physics.
He has been accused of publishing papers on the scientific pre-print archive arXiv.org under pseudonyms, such as G. Felici, and G. Forst]
References
External links
CV at LARES-mission.com
20th-century Italian physicists
Living people
1951 births
Sapienza University of Rome alumni
University of Salento faculty
University of Texas at Austin College of Natural Sciences alumni
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