Fabiola Gianotti obtained a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from the University of Milano in 1989. Since 1994 she has been a research physicist at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. She is also a corresponding member of the Italian Academy of Sciences, foreign associate member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and of the French Academy of Sciences, and honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Dr. Gianotti has worked on several CERN experiments, covering detector R&D and construction, software development and data analysis. She has been involved in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project since the beginning (early ‘90s) in the context of the ATLAS experiment. 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 discovery of the Higgs boson in a seminar at CERN.
Dr. Gianotti has received 11 honorary doctoral degrees. She 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 (2013), the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society (2013), the Medal of Honour of the Niels Bohr Institute (Copenhagen, 2013), and the Wilhelm Exner Medal (Vienna, 2017).
She was included among the Guardian newspaper's “Top 100 most inspirational women” in 2011, ranked 5th in Time magazine’s Personality of the Year in 2012, included among the “Top 100 most influential women” by Forbes magazine (USA, 2013 and 2017) and considered among the “Leading Global Thinkers of 2013” by Foreign Policy magazine (USA, 2013).
On January 1, 2016 she became Director-General of CERN.
Stephen Sekula
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