{"id":22723,"date":"2015-12-30T09:02:47","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T17:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/millennium-physicist-ready-to-take-helm-at-nuclear-center\/"},"modified":"2015-12-30T09:02:47","modified_gmt":"2015-12-30T17:02:47","slug":"millennium-physicist-ready-to-take-helm-at-nuclear-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/millennium-physicist-ready-to-take-helm-at-nuclear-center\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Millennium physicist’ ready to take helm at nuclear center"},"content":{"rendered":"

GENEVA \u2014<\/strong> Fabiola Gianotti, who this week takes the helm at CERN, home to the world\u2019s largest particle accelerator, is seen as a new breed of scientist. 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 \u201ca citizen of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gianotti \u201cembodies for me what\u2019s much more the millennium physicist,\u201d said Dr. Monica Dunford, senior scientist at Germany\u2019s University of Heidelberg, who spent six years at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research. \u201cNot so geeky, much more well-rounded, diverse, passionate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFabiola brings freshness to science: She\u2019s incredibly energetic, incredibly passionate, has a lot of different talents. … She has a degree in piano in addition to physics,\u201d Dunford said.<\/p>\n

Gianotti, who succeeds Germany\u2019s Rolf Heuer as director-general on Jan. 1, becoming the first woman to hold the post, insists she doesn\u2019t want to be \u201cfront stage\u201d at the multinational laboratory on the Swiss-French border: Her bigger focus is about helping produce science for science\u2019s sake in the quest to explain the how universe works.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmess\u201d during her move, Gianotti mused about an innovative, democratic community where Nobel laureates lunch with 25-year-old Ph.D. students.<\/p>\n

\u201cCERN is a special place where we do fund research by bringing together experts from over the planet \u2014 great scientists \u2014 but also a huge amount of young people,\u201d she said. It\u2019s \u201ca democratic environment in that there are no barriers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The center\u2019s 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, 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 \u201cGod Particle\u201d for its key position in the standard model of physics.<\/p>\n

At that time, Gianotti headed Atlas, a team of 3,000 scientists and one of two independent teams that turned up the Higgs. That year, she was a runner-up to President Barack Obama as Time\u2019s Person of the Year. But achieving an encore to the headline-grabbing event like the Higgs discovery will be no small feat.<\/p>\n

The collider has just completed \u201cRun II\u201d \u2014 its second-ever cycle of operations \u2014 and will take a traditional winter break until resuming in March.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 the unexplained mass that makes up 25 percent of the universe but sits outside the standard model.<\/p>\n

Run by scientists and all but unconstrained by economic demands, CERN has become a broad incubator of ideas. It was here that Britain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Gianotti, one of the world\u2019s great physicists, also has skills in crisis management \u2014 such as during trouble with one of the proton beams in 2009 that caused disgruntlement from funding agencies, collaboration teams and equipment makers, Dr. Dunford said.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe showed the whole of CERN that she could really handle that kind of pressure,\u201d said Dunford. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t really get worse than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Swiss and French police have stepped up border controls amid new counterterrorism measures that at times snarls traffic at CERN\u2019s entrance, inside it remains a haven of collaboration above mundane matters, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt reinforces the importance of places like CERN to foster peace, collaboration and showing that people from all over the world can work together regardless of their ethnicity, religion, tradition, language, color of their skin, age, etc.\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She had upbeat words for an accord reached this fall with America\u2019s Fermilab, an upcoming decade-long CERN project to soup up the luminosity of Large Hadron Collider that will allow for creation of 15 million Higgs bosons a year, and China\u2019s plans to build its own, much bigger collider.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great thing because particle physics is becoming more and more global,\u201d Gianotti said. \u201cThe outstanding questions in particle physics are so important, but also so complex, that just one instrument is not enough to address them all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gianotti said she doesn\u2019t feel she faced additional hurdles ascending the ranks at the world\u2019s largest particle accelerator. But she acknowledges that\u2019s not the case for all women.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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.,\u201d Gianotti said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t feel I was treated a different way because I was a woman,\u201d she said, noting that one in five collaborators in the Atlas project were women. \u201cBut I also have to tell that some of my colleagues had a more difficult life. … Some others suffered a bit and had to face some hurdles and some difficulties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gianotti acknowledges there could be surprises ahead, but hopes they are scientific, not managerial.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am very much honored by the role, not so much because I am a woman, but because I am a scientist, and having the honor and the privilege of leading perhaps the most important laboratory in the world in our field is a big challenge,\u201d she said. \u201cI will do my best.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GENEVA \u2014 Fabiola Gianotti, who this week takes the helm at CERN, home to the world\u2019s largest particle accelerator, is seen as a new breed of scientist. Trained in arts and literature, she came to physics relatively late. She enjoys cooking, jogging, music and keeping her eye on the news<\/a>, and notes the importance of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":22724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-22723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22723"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}