In recognition of her leadership as Spokesperson of the ATLAS international collaboration and as Director-General of CERN in promoting science as a vehicle for broad international cooperation
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, and since August 2013 an honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh. 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. She has contributed to all aspects of this project, from detector R&D, to the design of the electromagnetic calorimeter and its construction, the development of the physics potential and strategy (in particular for searches of the Higgs boson), and data taking.
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, which saw the formal announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Dr. Gianotti is the author or co-author of more than 550 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
She was a member of several international committees, such as the Scientific Council of the CNRS (France), the Physics Advisory Committee of the Fermilab Laboratory (USA), the Council of the European Physical Society, the Scientifc Council of the DESY Laboratory (Germany), the Scientific Advisory Committee of NIKHEF (Netherlands). She was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the UN Secretary-General, Mr Ban Ki-moon.
She received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Uppsala (2012), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) de Lausanne (2013), McGill University Montreal (2014), University of Oslo (2014), University of Edinburgh (2015), University of Roma Tor Vergata (2017), University of Chicago (2018), University Federico II of Naples (2018), Weizmann Institute, Israel (2018), Université de Paris-Sud (2018) and the Université Savoie-Mont Blanc (2018).
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 (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 1st January 2016 she has become Director-General of CERN.
>> See the press release.