New breed of scientist takes reins at CERN
Italian physicist with diverse skill set becomes first woman to lead multinational lab
GENEVA— Fabiola Gianotti, who last week took the helm at CERN, home to the 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.
“Not so geeky, much more well rounded, diverse, passionate. 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 notes.
Gianotti, who succeeded 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 SwissFrench border: her bigger focus is about helping produce science for science’s sake in the quest to explain 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-fuelled 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 PhD students.
“CERN is a special place where we do fund research by bringing together experts from all 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 centre’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-kilometre underground tunnel at nearly the speed of light. The $10-billion collider, said to be the biggest machine ever built, is best known for 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.
At that time, Gianotti headed Atlas, a group of 3,000 scientists and one of two independent teams that discovered the particle. That year, she was a runner-up to U.S. President Barack Obama as Time’s Person of the Year. But achieving an encore to a headline-grabbing event like the Higgs discovery will be no small feat.
The collider has just completed “Run II” — its second-ever cycle of operations — and will take a traditional winter break before resuming in March.
Created in 1954, CERN has become a think-tank where grey matter meets matter. Most recently, it is focusing on a quest to explain dark matter, the shadowy mass that makes up 25 per cent 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 advances and applications are constantly being churned out.
Gianotti, one of the world’s great physicists, also has skills in crisis management — for instance, when trouble with one of the proton beams in 2009 caused disgruntlement among funding agencies, collaboration teams and equipment makers, Dunford said. “She showed the whole of CERN that she could really handle that kind of pressure,” said Dunford. “It doesn’t really get worse than that.”
While Swiss and French police have stepped up border controls amid new counterterrorism measures that, at times, snarl traffic at CERN’s entrance, inside it remains a haven of collaboration that transcends borders and mundane matters, she said.
Gianotti had upbeat words for an accord reached this fall with Amer-
“I didn’t feel I was treated a different way because I was a woman. But I also have to tell (you) that some of my colleagues had a more difficult life.” FABIOLA GIANOTTI CERN’S NEW DIRECTOR-GENERAL
ica’s Fermilab, an upcoming decadelong CERN project to soup up the luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider that will allow for the creation of 15 million Higgs bosons a year, and China’s plans to build its own, much bigger collider.
“It’s a great thing because particle physics is becoming more and more global,” Gianotti said. “The outstanding questions in particle physics are so important, but also so complex, that just one instrument is not enough to address them all.”
Gianotti said she doesn’t feel she faced extra hurdles ascending the ranks at the world’s largest particle accelerator. But she acknowledges that this is not the case for all women.
“In general, I think the mentality is changing and people are more and more recognizing that what they are looking for is excellence in science, in managerial skill, etc.,” Gianotti said.
“I didn’t feel I was treated a different way because I was a woman,” she said, noting that one in five collaborators in the Atlas project was female.
“But I also have to tell (you) that some of my colleagues had a more difficult life . . . Some others suffered a bit and had to face some hurdles and some difficulties.”
Gianotti acknowledges there may be surprises ahead, but she hopes they are scientific, not managerial.
“I am very much honoured by the role, not so much because I am a woman, but because I am a scientist, and having the honour and the privilege of leading perhaps the most important laboratory in the world in our field is a big challenge,” she said. “I will do my best.”