Fabiola Gianotti received a PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Milan in 1989 and joined CERN as a research physicist in 1994. From 2009 to 2013, she was the head (“spokesperson”) of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It was during this period that the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.

She was appointed Director-General of CERN for a first term of office starting in 2016 and renewed for a second term starting in 2021. She is the first woman to have held this role, and the first Director-General to be reappointed for a full second term. She has received 15 honorary doctoral degrees from universities across the world and is a foreign member of eight academies of science worldwide. She was ranked fifth in Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue in 2012. In 2013, she was a joint recipient of both the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Italian Physical Society’s Enrico Fermi Prize, and in 2019 she received the Tate Medal for International Leadership from the American Institute of Physics.