Fabiola Gianotti (Italian pronunciation: [faˈbiola dʒaˈnotːi]) (born 1962) is the Italian particle physicist in charge of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, considered the world's biggest scientific experiment.[1][2] The ATLAS collaboration consists of almost 3,000 physicists from 169 institutions, 37 countries and five continents. ATLAS is the biggest detector ever built at a particle collider. Gianotti served as ATLAS physics coordinator from 1999 to 2003 and has worked with the collaboration since its inception.
Gianotti holds a Ph.D. in experimental sub-nuclear physics from the University of Milan, Italy. She joined CERN in 1987, working on various experiments including the UA2 experiment and ALEPH on the Large Electron Positron collider, the precursor to the LHC at CERN. Her thesis was on data analysis for the UA2 experiment.
Gianotti began working on liquid-argon calorimetry at the LHC in 1990 and continued that work for ATLAS when the collaboration began in 1992. Gianotti also worked on LEP2's supersymmetry search between 1996 and 2000.
Gianotti is also a member of the Physics Advisory Committee at Fermilab, the particle physics laboratory at Batavia, Illinois. A trained pianist, she has a professional music diploma from the Milan Conservatory.[2]