Ignazio Ciufolini with Antonio Paolozzi and the LARES team of Sapienza University.

Ignazio Ciufolini (born in Rome, Italy)

Italian physicist active in the field of gravitational physics, General Relativity and space research.

He graduated 'Magna cum Laude' in 1980 at Sapienza University of Rome and awarded the PhD degree in Physics in 1984 at University of Texas at Austin. His PhD committee was composed by John Archibald Wheeler, Richard Matzner, Steven Weinberg (Nobel prize of physics 1979), Bryce DeWitt, and Larry Shepley.

From 1982 to 1988 he worked at University of Texas at Austin as teaching assistant, research associate and lecturer (faculty member of the Univ. of Texas at Austin).

From 1999 he is Associate Professor of General Physics at University of Salento (Italy), with habilitation for Full Professor (of Experimental Physics, from 2013, and of Theoretical Physics, also from 2013). He is also member of Centro Fermi, Rome (Italy).

He is the author of about 200 scientific papers and academic books on General Relativity, published with the top world experts on gravitational phyiscs and General Relativity, such as John Archibald Wheeler and Roger Penrose.

He collaborated with John Archibald Wheeler, with whom in 1995 wrote the book Gravitation and Inertia (the book awarded the USA Association of American Publishers' PROSE Award as the best 1995 professional and scholar book in physics and astronomy).

Between 1992 and 1998 he has been a member of the international ESA-NASA team for the study of a space experiment for detection of gravitational waves using an orbiting laser interferometer, that lead to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) project. Link

He works mainly in the field of General Relativity and Gravitational Physics. He proposed also a method to measure the effects of gravitomagnetism using the data from the laser ranged satellites LAGEOS and LAGEOS-2. In 2004 he measured the dragging of inertial frames with an accuracy of about 10% using the LAGEOS and LAGEOS 2 satellites, Nature dedicated its 2004 cover story to such measurement. In 2019 he published a measurement of dragging of inertial frames with an accuracy of about 2% using the LARES satellite. The European Physical Journal dedicated its cover story to such measurements.

In 2019 he devised and published a test of the equivalence principle using the LARES satellite.

Ignazio Ciufolini is the Principal Investigator and the proposer of two space missions: LAser RElativity Satellite (LARES), a satellite successfully launched in February 2012 by ESA (the European Space Agency) and LARES II, to be launched in 2020 by ESA. Both satellites, funded by ASI (the Italian Space Agency), are aimed to test Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

For his works in the fields of gravitational physics and General Relativity Ignazio Ciufolini was awarded in London the 2010 International  Occhialini Prize and Medal of the UK Institute of Physics (IOP) and the Italian Physical Society (SIF), and the 2001 International Tomassoni-Chisesi Award for Physics of Sapienza, University of Rome.