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Cern head gets second spin

Image: Claudia Marcelloni [CC BY-SA 4.0] via CERN

Europe’s particle physics lab making Fabiola Gianotti first director-general to serve full second term

Cern’s governing council has appointed Fabiola Gianotti, the particle physics laboratory’s current director general, to serve a second five-year term from January 2021.

Ursula Bassler, president of the Cern Council, praised Gianotti’s “strong leadership and experience” in an announcement on 6 November.

Describing her reappointment as “a huge responsibility”, Gianotti said her second term would be “crucial for laying the foundations of Cern’s future projects”, which include upgrading its Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator and planning for the LHC’s long-term replacement.

Before her first term leading Cern started in January 2016, Gianotti ran the team behind the organisation’s ATLAS experiment from 2009 to 2013, a period in which it confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a long-theorised fundamental particle of matter.