Fabiola Gianotti (1960– )
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031340
Born on 29 October 1960 in Rome, Fabiola Gianotti is a particle physicist and the director-general of CERN. Gianotti earned a PhD in particle physics at the University of Milan in Italy. She has spent almost all of her professional career at CERN, where she was a member of several experiment teams, including the UA2 experiment, which discovered the W and Z bosons in 1983, and the ATLAS experiment, which discovered the Higgs boson along with the CMS experiment in 2012. Gianotti led ATLAS from 2009 to 2013 and presented the details of the Higgs discovery to a packed crowd of physicists on 4 July 2012. In 2016 she became the first woman to hold the position of CERN director-general. (Photo credit: CERN)
Date in History: 29 October 1960
