Dr. Fabrizio Pinto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Izmir University of Economics in Izmir, Turkey, where he founded the EKOSPACE center for research on artificial satellites, and he is an advisor to the Turkish Space Agency. He pursues research in the application of dispersion forces, such as the Casimir and van der Waals forces, to novel technologies on the nanoscale with target applications in next-generation spacecraft.
Fabrizio has published research on the interaction of gravitation and quantum systems in which the outcome depends critically on the structure of spacetime, receiving awards from the Gravity Research Foundation. Topics of long-term interest are the history and philosophy of science; digital astronomy with small instruments and their application in space-awareness, orbital modeling, and navigation; and the gravitational N-body problem in astrophysics.
After an academic career in Idaho and Oregon, in 1996, Fabrizio joined the Navigation and Flight Mechanics section of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1999, he left JPL to pursue market disruptive applications enabled by dispersion forces in nanotechnology, obtaining ten US patents, some of which have also issued in the EU, Israel and Japan.
Between 2013 and 2017, Fabrizio was an Assistant Professor at Jazan University in Saudi Arabia. Fabrizio Pinto obtained his Laurea (Master’s degree) in physics cum laude from the University of Rome, “La Sapienza,” in 1984 after receiving an Enrico Persico scholarship from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. In 1989, he received his PhD from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, with a Sigma-Xi award-winning dissertation on globular star cluster formation in the protogalactic halo. Dr. Pinto is a fixed wing private pilot with a multi-engine instrument rating.
Links
• Website: Publications On Researchgate