The Pope has appointed Fabiola Gianotti, general director of CERN in Geneva, an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Born in Rome on October 29, 1960, Gianotti obtained a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Milan in 1989 and since 1994 she has been a researcher at CERN, where she coordinated Atlas, one of the two experiments of the. they discovered the Higgs boson, the particle through which matter exists.
In July 2012, during the seminar that made the discovery official, Gianotti presented the results obtained in the Atlas experiment together with the Cms experiment.
Since 2016 she has held the position of general director of CERN, the first woman to take on this role. She has been a member of numerous international scientific committees and of the advisory committee of the Secretary General of the United Nations.
