• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Scribe

Literary genius. Academic prowess

  • In the Press
  • Student Articles
  • Editor Blogs
    • Extended Reality: Applications and Implications
    • An Introduction to Flight
    • A Retrospective on Film
    • Psychology: Controversies and Myths
  • About
    • Alumni
    • Staff
  • Contact

Extraordinary Women in STEM: Dr. Fabiola Gianotti

March 7, 2018 by Madeleine Combs Leave a Comment

STEM banner

47b1bf_e0498f5ac8b642d7b1eb0f44f3b2a1da_mv2_d_2764_3869_s_4_2

 

 

 

“The search for knowledge is a long and difficult task”- Fabiola Gianotti

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Fabiola Gianotti is an unwavering optimist who grew up loving both science and art by taking influence from her parents in Italy. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a prima ballerina at La Scala in Milan or with Bolshoi in Moscow while also grew inspired to do scientific research after reading a biography on Marie Curie. In the arts realm, she learned that her talents fell in piano, not dance, and received a piano degree in Italy where she thought about becoming a professional classical pianist. However, she decided instead to pursue her science passion as she said, “I could cultivate music, but not physics, as a hobby”.

She went on to receive her PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Milan in 1989 and later became a research physicist in the department at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research). CERN currently own the largest and most powerful particle accelerator which is a machine used to accelerate subatomic particles to high velocities through electromagnetic fields. Gianotti had a chance to work on experiments with CERN including the large electron positron collider (LHC). She served as the project leader of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN which was an LHC experiment in the observation of the Higgs boson, which explains why some other elementary particles have mass. This particle proved so important that it has been nicknamed the “god particle”. In 2012, she and the leader from the co-team were the ones to announce this momentous discovery to the world.

She became the first woman to hold the director-general position at CERN where only 12 percent of the 2,500 physicists and engineers are women. Even in this largely male-dominated field she insists that she has never faced any discrimination because of her sex. She has become a role model for young women to look up to because of her leadership in science much as she looked up to Marie Curie as a young girl.

She has been awarded many honors such as Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’ordine by the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and received the Special Fundamental Physics Prize of the Milner Foundation as well as the Medal of Honor of the Niels Bohr Institute of Copenhagen, to name a few. As for her research, her optimism serves her well as the LHC continues to collect data about fundamental physics with increasing proton beam intensities and hopes to answer many questions about the nature of dark matter and why nature prefers matter to antimatter.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bibliography:

Sciolino, Elaine. “A Celebrated Physicist With a Passion for Music.” The New York Times, The New York Times,  www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/science/fabiola-gianotti-physics-cern.html.

“Dr. Fabiola Gianotti”, IOP Institute of Physics, www. iop.org/about/awards/hon_fellowship/page_68416.html

 

 

 

 


Madeleine Combs

View all posts

Filed Under: Featured Blogs

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Editor Blogs

  • An Introduction to Flight
  • Extended Reality: Applications and Implications
  • A Retrospective on Film
  • Psychology: Controversies and Myths

Recent Posts

  • Resolvent Analysis: A Revolutionary Technique for Understanding Turbulent Flows
    Oliver Khan
    May 20, 2023
  • Benzodiazepines for Anxiety Disorders
    Kaitlyn Woods
    April 25, 2023
  • The Structures of Fluid Flows and Our Efforts to Understand Them
    Oliver Khan
    April 25, 2023
  • The Benefits of Immersive Education
    Shanna Finnigan
    April 25, 2023
  • Exploring Los Angeles Through XR
    Shanna Finnigan
    April 12, 2023
  • The Calculus of Variations, the Euler-Lagrange Equation, and Classical Mechanics
    Oliver Khan
    April 11, 2023
  • Higher Dimensional Integration By Parts and Some Results on Harmonic Functions
    Oliver Khan
    April 11, 2023
  • Separation of Variables and the Method of Characteristics: Two of the Most Useful Ways to Solve Part…
    Oliver Khan
    April 11, 2023

Copyright © 2023 · Scribe on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in