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 Organization for Nuclear Research, and since August 2013 honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh.
Dr Gianotti has worked on several CERN experiments in the fields of detector construction, software development and data analysis. She was project leader (“Spokesperson”) of the ATLAS experiment at the time of the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Since 1st January 2016, she has been Director-General of CERN.
Dr Gianotti is a corresponding member of the Italian Academy of Sciences, foreign associate member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and of the French Academy of Sciences, and honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. She was awarded the honour of “Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana”, and was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Enrico Fermi Prize by the Italian Physical Society.
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.
Professional position
- Physicist and Director-General, CERN
Subject groups
- Astronomy and physics
Elementary particle physics
