CERN appoints first female director — salon.com

On Tuesday, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (more commonly known by its French acronym, CERN) announced that 54-year-old Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti would replace Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer in 2016. Gianotti will be the first woman ever to lead the prestigious institution. Gianotti previously led Atlas, one of the experiments that led to the discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson, a particle that helps physicists explain the existence of mass. That observation, the most important find in particle physics in half a century, landed Peter Higgs and Francois Englert a Nobel Prize in Physics last year for work predicting the particle’s existence…

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