Victor Ninov (, born 27 June 1959) is a Bulgarian physicist and former researcher who worked primarily in creating superheavy elements. He is known for the co-discoveries of elements 110, 111, and 112 (darmstadtium, roentgenium and copernicium). Ninov also claimed the creation of elements 116 and 118; however, an investigation concluded that he had falsified the evidence. The repercussions of the affair had an impact on the guidelines of conduct for several research institutions. Early life Victor Ninov was born in Bulgaria on 27 June 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; they bounced around from house to house. 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. Here, he distinguished himself as a very capable physicist: he was particularly good at building scientific instruments and coding analysis programs for them. This landed him a job at the nearby German research center GSI (Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung), where he worked on his doctorate and postdoctoral work of creating new elements. For his expertise, he was given sole control of the computer analysis program. Here, he became a rising star by co-discovering darmstadtium (element 110), roentgenium (element 111), and copernicium (element 112) by smashing ion beams into heavy elements using GSI's UNILAC (a type of particle accelerator) and analyzing the debris. Though an investigation later determined that these discoveries of element 110 and 112 included fabricated samples created by Ninov, additional evidence of the experiment was confirmed to be untampered with, rendering his co-discovery legitimate. These discoveries were made with the help of his addition of a gas separator to the particle accelerator to help filter out everything but the heavy elements they were looking for. He worked at Stanford University for a time. He was hired at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1996 as a world class expert for particle accelerator debris sensors, and analysis programs. Fraud investigation While working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Victor Ninov and his team pursued a hypothesis by Robert Smolańczuk that element 118 could be formed at relatively low energies by smashing 86Kr and 208Pb isotopes together. Ninov initially doubted the hypothesis he was pursuing; he is quoted as saying,