Gianotti elected to second term as CERN director-general

The CERN Council on 6 November renewed Fabiola Gianotti’s mandate to serve as the particle-physics laboratory’s director-general. She is the first person ever elected to a second term, a five-year appointment that will begin on 1 January 2021. Another first is that both the director-general and the council president—Ursula Bassler—are women.

Gianotti became the first woman to lead CERN when her current term began in 2016 . Among the highlights of her tenure have been the second run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the April 2019 unveiling of plans for Science Gateway, a public education and outreach center on which construction is set to start next year.

At the press conference announcing Gianotti’s reelection, Bassler said that CERN benefits from Gianotti’s “strong leadership and from her experience.” Upcoming projects include the construction of the High-Luminosity LHC, which will vastly increase the rate of particle collisions. In the coming years, Gianotti will oversee implementation of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, a set of priorities from the broader particle-physics community that considers activities in the field globally. Acting on the strategy group’s recommendations, which are expected to be finalized next May, Gianotti will guide CERN as it puts in place the foundations for its next big collider project—whatever that may be .

Asked how science can give hope to society in times of uncertainty, Gianotti said that “science must be brought to the table because it can give objective facts.” She stressed that “science can play a key role in connecting people in a world that is more and more fractured, because science is universal.” The laws of nature are the same everywhere, she said, and science is unifying because the quest for knowledge and for an understanding of how things work is common to all of humanity: “Science has no passport, no political party, no gender.”