Leader of team that discovered ‘God Particle’ is elected as head of CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, more commonly known as CERN, announced that the woman who led the efforts to detect the Higgs boson will head the institution.

by John Tyburski

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First published at Daily Digest News on November 4, 2014

Women continue to break through glass ceilings and climb the administrative ranks in science. In an unprecedented move, Fabiola Gianottia has been selected to be the first woman ever to lead the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Gianottia, the Italian physicist who led CERN’s efforts to find the Higgs boson in 2012, will begin in her role as director-general in 2016 and will hold the office for five years.

Gianottia was head of the ATLAS project that found the Higgs boson, or so-called “God particle,” which scientists say helps explain how the physical universe formed. The ATLAS team used CERN’s large hadron collider to gather evidence of the particle’s existence.

An international collaborative institution, CERN employs 2,400 people and hosts 10,000 scientists from over 113 countries annually. It’s ruling council, the body that chose Gianottia for the top administrative position, consists of representatives from 20 nations. CERN is world-renowned for scientific excellence and bestows inspiration and pride for physicists worldwide, according to Gianottia, who is proud to be tapped to lead the institution.

CERN was founded in 1954 and has since been a perennial global leader in innovation and international collaboration that leads to global advances in science and technology. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN scientist from Great Britain, invented the network that would go on to be the World Wide Web (claims by former vice president Al Gore notwithstanding). The original impetus for the Web was to have a means by which scientists could communicate rapidly across long distances.