Science | ‘Millennium physicist’ ready to take helm at nuclear center

Fabiola Gianotti

Fabiola Gianotti, who last week took the helm at CERN, home to world’s largest particle accelerator, is seen as a new breed of scientist. Initially trained in arts and literature, she came to physics relatively late. She enjoys cooking, jogging, music and keeping her eye on the news, and notes the importance of being “a citizen of the world.”
Gianotti “embodies for me what’s much more the millennium physicist,” said Dr. Monica Dunford, senior scientist at Germany’s University of Heidelberg, who spent six years at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research.
“Fabiola brings freshness to science: She’s incredibly energetic, incredibly passionate, has a lot of different talents. … She has a degree in piano in addition to physics,” Dunford said.
Gianotti, who succeeds Germany’s Rolf Heuer as director-general on Jan. 1, becoming the first woman to hold the post, insists she doesn’t want to be “front stage” at the multinational laboratory on the Swiss-French border: Her bigger focus is about helping produce science for science’s sake in the quest to explain the how the universe works.
The 55-year-old Italian stands out not just for her fashion sense in a sneakers-
and-jeans culture of coffee-fueled collaboration, sleepless nights and absent-mindedness about proper eating. In an interview held in a CERN conference room because her office was a “mess” during her move, Gianotti mused about an innovative, democratic community where Nobel laureates lunch with 25-year-old Ph.D. students.
“CERN is a special place where we do fund research by bringing together experts from over the planet — great scientists — but also a huge amount of young people,” she said. It’s “a democratic environment in that there are no barriers.”
The center’s particle accelerator smashes together atoms and monitors the results to help understand the universe on the most infinitesimal scale. The Large Hadron Collider sends protons whizzing through a circular, 27-kilometer (17-mile) underground tunnel at nearly the speed of light. The $10-billion LHC, said to be the biggest machine ever built, is best known for its experiments that provided evidence in 2012 of the Higgs boson, a minute particle some have called the “God Particle” for its key position in the standard model of physics.
Created in 1954, CERN has become a think tank where gray matter meets matter, and most recently, is focusing on a quest to explain dark matter — the unexplained mass that makes up 25 percent of the universe but sits outside the standard model.
Run by scientists and all but unconstrained by economic demands, CERN has become a broad incubator of ideas. It was here that Britain’s Tim Berners-Lee came up with the World Wide Web as a tool for scientists to communicate globally through the Internet. Spinoff science and applications are constantly being churned out. Jamey Keaten, Geneva, AP