Ignazio Ciufolini

Ignazio Ciufolini graduated magna cum laude in 1980 at Sapienza University of Rome, and received a PhD in physics in 1984 at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Richard Matzner.^[1]

From 1982 to 1988, he worked at University of Texas at Austin as a teaching assistant, lecturer and research associate. As of 2014, he is an associate professor of general physics at University of Salento (Italy),^[2] tenured since 1999, and a member of Centro Fermi, Rome.^[3] He collaborated with John Archibald Wheeler in 1995 to write Gravitation and Inertia,^[4][5] for which they won the PROSE Award for the best professional and scholar book in physics and astronomy.^[6] 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.^[7][8][9] He was featured on the cover of the 6 September 2007, issue of Nature, dedicated to his review paper on Dragging of Inertial Frames and General Relativity.^[7] He is the Principal Investigator for the Italian Space Agency (ASI) on the Laser Relativity Satellite (LARES) mission, a space mission aimed to improve the accuracy of the measurement of frame-dragging.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010, he won the Giuseppe Occhialini Medal and Prize, jointly awarded by the Italian Physical Society and the Institute of Physics.^[10]

In 2014, Ciufolini was accused^[11] of publishing papers on the scientific pre-print archive arXiv under pseudonyms, such as G. Felici^[12] and G. Forst,^[13] which is a violation of the arXiv terms.^{[14][15][16][17]} For this and other reasons, Ciufolini twice sued physicist Lorenzo Iorio for defamation, but he was acquitted in both cases.^[18] Not satisfied, Ciufolini sued Iorio for damages in civil court, winning the case this time.^[19]