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The first woman to run CERN
Fabiola Gianotti is a particle physicist born in
Italy in 1960.
Following in the footsteps of her mother, she
focused her studies almost exclusively on
classical humanities, art, literature and music.
However, as a teenager, her interest in philosophy and life's big questions led her to physics.
Therefore, in her opinion, it is a cliché without
foundations that scientists are only interested in
data and facts. She loves many other things.
Since 1994 she works as a physicist researcher
at CERN, the European Organization
for Nuclear Research, located in Switzerland.
CERN was the first acronym used for this Large
Hadron Collider. She began as a spokesperson
of the ATLAS project, whose goal was the
discovery of a particle that would explain why
nature's fundamental particles have mass, a
key aspect to understand the behaviour of matter. This particle, which was sought for decades, was given the name "Higgs boson".
An anecdote speaks to the character of Gianotti: on 4 July 2012 a seminar took place at
CERN to announce the
MEONE ELSE HAPPY."
discovery of the boson. Fabiola, presented the
results of the ATLAS experiments in the font
Comic Sans. Some people found the font was
not appropriate to show data of such historic
importance. Others saw it favourably. In the UK
a campaign was launched to change the name
of Comic Sans to CERN Comic.
Fabiola was amazed by the fuss since she
employed the font simply because she liked it.
And she is not about to stop using it!
Her in-depth knowledge of particle physics
earned her the direction of CERN in the 2016
election, being the first woman to occupy this
role.
In the year 2013 she was awarded the prize
Enrico Fermi from the Physics Society of Italy
and a year later, in 2014, was appointed Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell'Ordine Al Merito della
Repubblica Italiana.