Fabiola Gianotti

Gianotti in 2011

From an early age, Gianotti was interested in nature and the world around her.Her father, an acclaimed geologist encouraged her early love of learning.“It is from him I have inculcated my passion and love for nature,” she said in an interview with the Humans of Science.

Gianotti found her passion for scientific research after reading a biography on scientist, Marie Curie.Previously, she had studied the humanities, focusing on music and philosophy. Gianotti received a PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Milan in 1989.

Since 1996, following several postdoctoral positions, including a fellowship at CERN, she has been a research physicist in the Physics Department of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and since August 2013 an honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh. She is also a member of the Italian Academy of Sciences (Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei), foreign associate member of the US National Academy of Sciences and foreign associate of the French Academy of Science.

Gianotti has worked on several CERN experiments (WA70, UA2, ALEPH, ATLAS), being involved in detector R&D and construction, software development and data analysis.

She was/is a member of several international committees, such as the Scientific Council of the CNRS (France), the Physics Advisory Committee of the Fermilab Laboratory (USA), the Council of the European Physical Society, the Scientific Council of the DESY Laboratory (Germany), the Scientific Advisory Committee of NIKHEF (Netherlands). She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the UN Secretary-General, Mr Ban Ki-moon.

Higgs boson discovery

In 2009 Gianotti was elected as the project leader and spokesperson of the ATLAS project at CERN. ATLAS involved a collaboration of around 3,000 physicists from 180 institutions in 38 countries. ATLAS was one of the two experiments involved in the observation of the Higgs boson. On 4 July 2012 Gianotti announced the discovery of the particle. Until then, the Higgs boson was a theoretical part of the standard model in particle physics theory to explain how some fundamental particles acquire mass. Gianotti's deep understanding of many ATLAS aspects and her leadership were recognised as major factors in the discovery.

She appeared in the 2013 documentary film Particle Fever, about the work of the Large Hadron Collider.

Publications

Gianotti is the author or co-author of more than 500 publications in peer reviewed scientific journals. She has given more than 30 invited plenary talks at the major international conferences in the field.

Work environment

Gianotti had to push past barriers to be successful in a male dominated field.In the European scientific community, for every one woman, there are two men.Only 20% of the team that worked on the ATLAS project were women.Gianotti was the first female director of CERN, and she led two of the largest CERN experiments in 2012. She insists that she has never faced discrimination because of her gender, “I cannot say myself that I ever felt discriminated against,” she said. “Perhaps I was but I didn’t realize it.” Even though she feels that she was never discriminated against because she was a female, she is helping break down barriers the male dominated field created for aspiring female scientists.She specifically wants to give women more support when having children.She feels that she was never given enough support, and for this reason, never had children, a decision she now regrets.

Honours and awards

Gianotti was included among the “Top 100 most inspirational women” by The Guardian newspaper (UK, 2011), ranked 5th in Time magazine’s Personality of the Year (USA, 2012), as well as the runner-up for Person of the Year, included among the “Top 100 most influential women” by Forbes magazine (USA, 2013) and considered among the “Leading Global Thinkers of 2013” by Foreign Policy magazine (USA, 2013). She was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2018.

She has received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Uppsala, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), McGill University (Montreal), Oslo University, University of Edinburgh, University of Naples Federico II, University of Chicago, University of Savoy, and the Weizmann Institute of Science.

• Since 2013 she is honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh.

• In December 2014 Gianotti was awarded the honour of “Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’ordine al merito della Repubblica” by the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.
• In September 2013 Gianotti was awarded The Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society (2013).
• In November 2013 Gianotti was awarded The Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour.
• In December 2012 Gianotti was awarded the Fundamental Physics Prize of the Milner foundation: Special Breakthrough Prize.
• In December 2012 Gianotti was awarded the Gold Medal (known as "Ambrogino d'oro", named after the patron saint of Milan, Saint Ambrose) by the Milan Municipality.

Comic Sans controversy

When CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, much controversy sprang from Gianotti's use of Comic Sans in the slide presentation of the results. A physicist, Alby Reid, has even started an online petition calling Microsoft to change the name of the font to Comic Cerns. Vincent Connare, the font's creator has tweeted support for this petition. Gianotti had used Comic Sans in presenting information in the past, but the uproar was due largely to the importance of the material presented.

In a 2010 interview, Gianotti said that she saw no contradiction between science and faith and they belong to "two different spheres". In an interview by la Repubblica, she said that "Science and religion are separate disciplines, though not antithetical. You can be a physicist and have faith or not."