Fabiola Gianotti, PhD, is a particle physicist who served as CERN’s Director-General from 2016 to 2025, the first woman to hold the post and the first Director-General appointed for two full terms. She has made major contributions to several CERN experiments, working on detector R&D and construction, software development, and data analysis, with particular emphasis on technologies and strategies to search for the Higgs boson. As head of the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, she played a leading role in the 2012 discovery of this particle.
She has received 16 honorary doctorates worldwide and numerous prizes, including the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society, and the Tate Medal of the American Institute of Physics for International Leadership. She is a foreign member of seven academies and has been awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In 2012, Time magazine named her one of the top five “Person of the Year.”
From unlocking the mysteries of the Higgs boson to managing one of the world’s most complex scientific collaborations, Fabiola Gianotti shares what leadership looks like when purpose, passion, patience, and global collaboration...
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