Fabiola Gianotti, first woman to be appointed CERN's Director General

29 October 1960, Rome (Italy) - Today

In 1989, she received her PhD in elementary particle physics from the University of Milan (Italy).

She is a permanent researcher at the Physics Department of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN.

Since 1996, she has been involved in several laboratory experiments such as WA70, UA2, ALEPH, and ATLAS, for which she was spokesperson for the international collaboration from 2009 to 2013, and officially announced, together with John Incandela, spokesperson for the CMS experiment, the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at a seminar at CERN.

In 2011, she was listed among the ‘100 Most Inspirational Women in the World’ by The Guardian (UK), ranked fifth ‘Personality of the Year’ by Time magazine (US) in 2012, named among the ‘100 Most Influential Women in the World’ by Forbes magazine (US) in 2013 and considered among the ‘Top Global Thinkers’ by Foreign Policy magazine (US) in 2013.

In August 2013, she became an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and was awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society in the same year.

In 2014, she was appointed Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell'ordine al merito della Republlcia by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

In 2016, she was appointed Director General of CERN, the first woman to hold this position.

She is also a member of the Scientific Council of the UN Secretary-General, a member of the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, a foreign associate member of the US National Academy of Sciences and honorary doctorates from the University of Uppsala (Sweden), the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), McGill University (Canada), the University of Oslo (Norway) and the University of Edinburgh (Scotland).