Physicist from Italy is the first female Director General of CERN

In early November, CERN announced that Fabiola Gianotti has been nominated as the new Director-General of CERN (International Organization for Nuclear Research). The first female head of CERN will replace Rolf Heuer as of January 2016, for a five-year term. FCT congratulates the Italian physicist on her upcoming role as head of one of the organizations that has played a major part in the internationalization of Portuguese research. Fabiola Gianotti is well known to the Portuguese particle physics community, especially due to the participation of national research teams in the ATLAS experiment.

With a career as a CERN researcher since 1987, Fabiola Gianotti led the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ATLAS experiment from March 2009 to February 2013. In 2012, ATLAS was one of the experiments that announced the discovery of the much sought-after Higgs boson, which led to the Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs in 2013. More than 3,000 physicists from 174 institutions in 38 countries, including Portugal, take part in the ATLAS experiment.

According to Agnieszka Zalewska, President of the Council that elected Fabiola Gianotti, “It was Dr. Gianotti’s vision for CERN’s future as a world-leading accelerator laboratory, coupled with her in-depth knowledge of both CERN and the field of experimental particle physics, that led us to this outcome.”

Several companies and research centers in Portugal collaborate with CERN, securing privileged access to state-of-the-art equipment and cutting-edge technological facilities, which boost the international impact of the research that is carried out.

Research centers across the country collaborate with CERN. In Lisbon, the main users are the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP), the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN), the Center for Nuclear Sciences and Technologies (C2TN), and the Center for Theoretical Particle Physics (CFTP). In Guimarães, in the north, the Institute for Nanostructures, Nanomodeling, and Nanofabrication (i3N) and in Aveiro, the Center for Research in Ceramics and Composite Materials (CICECO) also have strong collaborations with CERN.