Victor Ninov

Victor Ninov was born in Bulgaria in 1959. He grew up in the capital city of Sofia. In the 1970s, when Ninov was a teenager, he and his family left for West Germany, Shortly after the move, Victor's father went missing; he was found dead six months later in the Bulgarian foothills due to causes unknown. == Career ==

Victor Ninov attended Technische Universität Darmstadt near Frankfurt, Germany. He distinguished himself as a very capable physicist: he was particularly good at building scientific instruments and coding analysis programs for them. He was hired by the nearby German research center GSI (Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung), where he completed his doctorate and pursued postdoctoral work creating new elements. For his expertise, he was given sole control of the computer analysis program. These discoveries were facilitated by Ninov's addition of a gas separator to the particle accelerator to help filter out everything but the heavy elements they were looking for. After working at Stanford University, Ninov was hired by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1996 as a world class expert in particle accelerator debris sensors and analysis programs. == Fraud investigation ==

While working at LBNL, Ninov and his team pursued a hypothesis by Robert Smolańczuk, then a visiting fellow from Poland on a Fulbright scholarship, that element 118 could be formed at relatively low energies by smashing 86Kr and 208Pb isotopes together. Eager to prove their discovery, the team double-checked their instruments, and tried again. In 2010, some of the nuclides that were originally claimed as decay products of element 118 were truly synthesized at LBNL; the 2010 observations did not match the claimed 1999 data. Ninov has continued to maintain that he was innocent. The affair resulted in stricter guidelines for coauthors, clarifying their roles and duties and requiring them to vouch for their contributions to published work. The American Physical Society called for increased ethical training and oversight at research institutions and sponsored educational efforts to make the scientific community more resilient to scientific fraud. Reports on the Ninov affair were released around the same time as the final report on the Schön affair, another major incident of data falsification in physics, and this amplified its impact. ==Personal life==

His wife, Caroline Cox, a former history professor at University of the Pacific, died in 2014 of cancer. They were married for 23 years. Ninov had helped her finish her book, Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution, and it was published posthumously. He pilots a four-seat plane, an Aero Commander. ==See also==