Fabiola Gianotti was born in Rome on 29 October 1960 and became one of the most visible experimental particle physicists of her generation. She is best known as the spokesperson of the ATLAS collaboration when that experiment, together with CMS, announced the discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson in 2012, and as the first woman to serve as Director-General of CERN, a post she held from January 2016 through December 2025.
Her path into physics was not the most direct. At a liceo classico she studied literature, Latin, ancient Greek and philosophy. She also trained seriously in classical dance and, for a time, considered a career as a ballerina. After secondary school she studied piano at the Milan Conservatory and earned a diploma, weighing a life as a classical pianist. A biography of Marie Curie is often cited as the reading that turned her toward scientific research. She then entered physics at the University of Milan, completing a doctorate in experimental particle physics in 1989. Her thesis drew on data from the UA2 experiment at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron.
That early connection to CERN shaped the rest of her career. From 1990 to 1996 she worked as a research physicist at the University of Milan while continuing to participate in experiments at the Geneva laboratory. She became a permanent research physicist in CERN’s Physics Department in the mid-1990s. Over those years she contributed to detector work, software and data analysis on several programmes: WA70, which searched for direct photons in hadron collisions; UA2, which had played a central role in the discovery of the W and Z bosons; and ALEPH at the Large Electron–Positron collider, which made precision measurements of the Z boson and searched for the Higgs boson at lower energies. Those experiments trained her in the practical culture of large collaborations, where thousands of channels, complex triggers and careful calibration determine whether a signal can be trusted.
By the late 1990s her attention had shifted to the Large Hadron Collider, then still under construction. She became deeply involved in the physics programme of ATLAS, one of the two general-purpose detectors being built for the new machine. In 1999 she was appointed ATLAS Physics Coordinator, a role that required her to shape the experiment’s strategy for measuring known particles and searching for new ones, including a Higgs boson in channels such as diphotons and four leptons. The work was both technical and organisational. ATLAS was designed as a layered instrument roughly the size of a cathedral, with an inner tracker, electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters, and a muon spectrometer immersed in a large toroidal magnetic field. Preparing its physics case meant coordinating hundreds of analysts across dozens of institutes and deciding which signatures would be the benchmarks for discovery.
In March 2009 she was elected spokesperson of the ATLAS collaboration, a position she held until February 2013. The timing was extraordinary. The LHC began circulating beams in 2008, suffered a serious helium-release incident that delayed operations, and then started producing collisions in earnest in 2010. As spokesperson she was the public and scientific face of a collaboration of several thousand physicists. Her tasks included setting priorities, defending the experiment’s results, and keeping a vast international team coherent as the data arrived faster than anyone had previously handled. On 4 July 2012, in the CERN auditorium, she and Joe Incandela, then spokesperson of CMS, presented the evidence for a new boson near 125 GeV. Both experiments had seen excesses in the diphoton and four-lepton channels that matched the expectations for a Higgs boson, the particle associated with the field that gives mass to the W and Z bosons and to fermions in the Standard Model. The announcement ended a search that had lasted nearly half a century and confirmed the last missing piece of the Standard Model’s particle content. Gianotti later described the difficulty of keeping the collaboration lucid and rigorous at a moment of intense emotion.
The discovery brought wide recognition. In 2012 she was listed among the finalists in Time magazine’s Person of the Year feature. In 2013 she shared the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society. She received the Medal of Honour of the Niels Bohr Institute the same year, and later the Wilhelm Exner Medal and the Tate Medal of the American Institute of Physics for international leadership. Italy awarded her the rank of Cavaliere di Gran Croce of the Order of Merit of the Republic. She has been elected to or associated with academies including the Accademia dei Lincei, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and others, and she has collected honorary doctorates from universities across Europe, North America and Israel. She is an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh.
In November 2014 the CERN Council appointed her Director-General, with her term beginning on 1 January 2016. She was the first woman to hold the office. In November 2019 the Council reappointed her for a second five-year term starting in January 2021, the first time a Director-General had been given a full second mandate. Her decade in the post covered the second run of the LHC, the long shutdown that prepared the machine and detectors for higher luminosity, and the start of Run 3. She oversaw a laboratory whose mission extends beyond the Higgs boson to precision measurements, searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, heavy-ion physics, antimatter studies, and a broad programme of technology transfer and training. She also represented CERN in negotiations with member and associate member states and in discussions about the future of high-energy physics in Europe, including studies of a possible next-generation collider.
Gianotti’s public style has been notably measured. She has repeatedly argued that fundamental research is justified both by its cultural value and by the technologies and skills it produces, from medical imaging and data handling to superconducting magnets and worldwide computing grids. She has spoken about the importance of long-term planning in a field where machines take decades to design and build, and about the need to keep particle physics open to young researchers from many countries. Colleagues have often noted her command of detail and her preference for careful language when results are still preliminary.
By the end of her second term in December 2025 she had spent more than thirty years at CERN, moving from thesis student on a fixed-target experiment to head of the organisation that operates the world’s highest-energy collider. The Higgs discovery remains the scientific event most closely associated with her name, but her longer contribution lies in the management of the instrument and the community that made that discovery possible, and in the stewardship of the laboratory through the decade that followed.