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 September 6, 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 2014, Ciufolini was accused of publishing papers on the scientific pre-print archive arXiv.org under pseudonyms, such as G. Felici[11] and G. Forst,[12] which is a violation of the arXiv terms, but the accusation was later retracted.[13][14][15]
^Felici, G. (2007). "The meaning of systematic errors, a comment to "Reply to on the Systematic Errors in the Detection of the Lense-Thirring Effect with a Mars Orbiter", by Lorenzo Iorio". arXiv:gr-qc/0703020.
^Forst, G. (2007). "A critical analysis of the GP-B mission. I: On the impossibility of a reliable measurement of the gravitomagnetic precession of the GP-B gyroscopes". arXiv:0712.3934 [gr-qc].
