Fabiola Gianotti

How basic sciences underpin development Director-General of CERN

Fabiola Gianotti is the Director-General of CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics. She received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from the University of Milano in 1989. Since 1994 she is a research physicist at CERN, and since 2013 an honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh. She is an associate member of several Academies, including the Italian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the French Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, London, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

 Dr Gianotti has worked on several CERN experiments, covering detector R&D and construction, software development and data analysis.

 From March 2009 to February 2013 she held the elected position of project leader (”Spokesperson”) of the ATLAS experiment. On 4 July 2012 she presented the ATLAS results on the search for the Higgs boson in a seminar at CERN that saw the formal announcement of the discovery of this special particle by the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

Gianotti was a member of several international committees and received fourteen honorarydoctoral degrees from Universities across the world.

Dr Gianotti was awarded the honour of “Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana”. She received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society, and the Tate medal of the American Institute of Physics for International Leadership.

She was included among the Guardian newspaper's “Top 100 most inspirational women” in 2011 and ranked 5th in Time magazine’s Personality of the Year in 2012.