SHORT CV

Fabrizio Pinto obtained his Laurea cum laude in physics 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 Ph.D from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, U.S.A. with a Sigma-Xi award-winning dissertation on globular star cluster formation and the application of supercomputers to the gravitational N-body problem. After an early academic career in the U.S., in 1996, Dr. Pinto joined the Navigation and Flight Mechanics section of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech in Pasadena, California. He carried out pre-launch research in support of the Stardust and Deep Space 1 missions, and he was the orbit determination specialist during the Galileo orbiter E19 Europa flyby in 1999. He was a member of the JPL Interstellar Program identifying the core technologies necessary for future travel to extrasolar planetary systems. In 1999, Dr. Pinto left JPL to pursue market disruptive applications enabled by the manipulation of Casimir forces. As a California physicist entrepreneur, he obtained ten US patents, some of which have also issued in the EU and Japan, in the subfield referred to as dispersion force- or quantum vacuum-engineering. Between 2013 and 2017, he pursued an intense experimental R&D effort in this rapidly expanding field at Jazan University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Dr. Pinto is now focusing on advanced demonstrations of breakthrough dispersion force-enabled devices with applications in novel nanoparticle space propulsion, high density energy storage, nanorobots and nanooscillators, adaptive optics, and sensing involving membranes. His theoretical research also includes studies of the fundamental nature of the gravitational field. Dr. Pinto is a fixed wing private pilot with a multi-engine instrument rating.