Fabiola Gianotti is the Director-General of CERN, the European Laboratory for particle physics, since January 2016, the first woman to hold the position.

She received a PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Milano in 1989. Since 1994 she has been a research physicist in the Physics Department of CERN. She is associate member of the French, Irish, Italian and US Academies of Sciences, and of the Royal Society of London.

She led the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at the time of the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012.

She received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Uppsala, the EPFL (Lausanne), McGill University (Montreal), Oslo University, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Roma Tor Vergata.

She co-chaired, along with six other women, the 2018 World Economic Forum Annual meeting in Davos. 

Dr Gianotti was awarded with the Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’ordine al merito della Repubblica, Italy.  She received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2012), the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society (2013), the Medal of Honor of the Niels Bohr Institute (Copenhagen, 2013), and the Wilhelm Exner Medal (Vienna, 2017). She is ranked on various lists, including; “Top 100 most inspirational women”, The Guardian (2011), “Top 100 most influential women, Forbes Magazine (2013 and 2017),” Leading Global Thinkers of 2013, Foreign Policy magazine (2013), 5th in Time magazine’s Personality of the Year in 2012.