Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian particle physicist and the first woman to hold the position of Director-General of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Gianotti was born in 1960 in Rome, Italy. From a young age, she showed remarkable powers of concentration and developed talents in cooking, music and art at home, and Greek, Latin and philosophy while at school. Initially, Gianotta had wanted to study philosophy at university but transferred to physics because she wanted to be able search for answers in a more practical way. She studied physics at the University of Milan, before continuing her study to finally graduate with a Ph.D in experimental particle physics in 1989.

In 1994, Gianotti joined CERN as a research physicist in the psychics department where she worked on a variety of projects including the ATLAS experiment, which she was the elected projected leader of from March 2009 to February 2013. The ATLAS Collaboration consists of 3000 physicists from 40 countries and is one of the seven particle detector experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, TOTEM, LHCb,LHCf and MoEDAL) constructed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It involves the running of the 151 ft. (46 m) long and 82 ft. (25 m) high ATLAS detector, which is equipped with a massive magnet system that allows the paths of charged particles to be bent so they can be measured. Gianotti made vital contributions to the liquid-argon calorimeter, which detects electromagnetic energy, which allows it to respond in less than 50 billionths of a second, so energy from particles moving close to the speed of light can be detected. She was also responsible for defining the overall scientific strategy, supervising the day-by-day progress of the experiment and the operation of the 7,000-ton machine and dealing with the unavoidable budgeting and personnel issues that may arise.

In July 2012, Gianotti presented the ATLAS results on the search for the Higgs boson in an historic seminar at CERN alongside Edinburgh academic Peter Higgs. The discovery of the Higgs boson was a triumph for European science, CERN and our understanding of the cosmos. Gianotti has authored, or co-authored over 500 publications in scientific journals and given more than 30 invited plenary talks at major international conferences in her field. In 2013, she became an honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh, and is a corresponding member of the Italian Academy of Sciences (Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei) and foreign associate member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

In 2016, Gianotti became the first female Director-General of CERN. She has been the recipient of many honours, including: the “Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’ordine al merito della Repubblica” by the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano; The Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society; The Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour; the Fundamental Physics Prize and the Gold Medal or “Ambrogino d’oro”, named after the patron saint of Milan, Saint Ambrose by the Milan Municipality. She holds honorary degrees from the University of Uppsala, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), McGill University (Montreal), Oslo University and University of Edinburgh.

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