Italian physicist appointed Director-General of CERN

At the beginning of November, Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti was appointed Director-General of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). With a five-year mandate, she is the first woman to assume the leadership of the institution, succeeding Rolf Heuer from January 2016. FCT welcomes this appointment to the leadership of a key institution for the internationalization of research in Portugal. Fabiola Gianotti is well known to the Portuguese particle physics community, in particular due to the participation of national teams in the ATLAS experiment.

A researcher at CERN since 1987, Fabiola Gianotti led the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) between March 2009 and February 2013. In 2012, the ATLAS experiment was one that announced to the world the discovery of the much sought-after Higgs boson, a discovery that led to the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs the following year. ATLAS involves more than 3000 scientists from 174 institutions in 38 countries, including Portugal.

Agnieszka Zalewska, Chair of the Board that elected Fabiola Gianotti stated that "it was her vision of CERN's future as the leading global particle accelerator laboratory, coupled with her in-depth knowledge of both CERN and the field of particle physics" that led to the decision.

Several Portuguese companies and research centers collaborate with CERN, ensuring privileged access to state-of-the-art equipment and technology for experimentation and maximizing the internationalization factor of their research.

The Portuguese collaboration within this infrastructure is decentralized, in Lisbon, scientists from the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP), the Institute for Plasma and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN), the Center for Nuclear Science and Technology (C2TN) and the Center for Theoretical Particle Physics (CFTP) participate in collaborative projects with CERN. In Guimarães, the Institute for Nanostructures, Nanomodelling and Nanofabrication (i3N) and in Aveiro, the Centre for Research in Ceramics and Composite Materials (CICECO) also have teams conducting research in collaboration with CERN.