Foundation Prize
Laureate 2024
Fabiola Gianotti
Prix 2024 awarded to Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General of CERN
Monday May 13, 2024 at 6.30pm at the Victoria Hall
The Fondation pour Genève has chosen to award its 30th prize to Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General of CERN, in recognition of her exceptional commitment to Geneva’s international reputation. From the realization of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to the discovery of the Higgs boson and the creation of the Science Portal, Fabiola Gianotti has contributed to a number of major projects that have made Geneva a leading player in the world of science and in the diplomatic arena. Her dynamism, her passion for the transmission of knowledge, democratization of science and openness to all public make her a real inspiration for the younger generations.
“I am extremely honored to receive the Fondation pour Genève prize. The development of science and technology, openness, collaboration across borders and the training of young generations are fundamental values at CERN, which are also deeply rooted in international Geneva. The fact that these values, which are so dear to me, are being recognized is particularly meaningful to me.” – Fabiola Gianotti
The ceremony is available in replay here.
Fabiola Gianotti is Director-General of CERN in Geneva. She is the first woman to hold this position in CERN’s history. In November 2019, she was unanimously appointed for a second term, the first time in the organization’s history that a Director General has been elected for a full second mandate.
After obtaining a PhD in particle physics in 1989 from the University of Milan, she pursued her career as a research physicist at CERN from 1996. She contributed to several experiments at CERN, in particular the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project as part of the ATLAS experiment. She played a major role in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, when she led ATLAS. In 2018, she initiated the Science Portal project, a center dedicated to science communication and education, to welcome a greater number of visitors and spark the curiosity of future generations towards fundamental research.
Fabiola Gianotti is an associate member of the US Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Society of London, the Italian Academy of Sciences and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. She has been made a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, and has received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2013), the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society (2013), the Wilhelm Exner Medal (Vienna, 2017), and the Tate Medal for International Leadership de l’American Institute of Physics (2019).
