Dr. Fabiola Gianotti, an Italian physicist, will be the first woman to lead the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the international research center that discovered the Higgs boson, or the "God particle," a particle and energy field able to convert matter to mass.

Dr. Gianotti will take over from current director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer starting January 1, 2016, the research center announced Tuesday.

Like Us on Facebook

CERN built and operates the world's biggest atom smasher, the 27 kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It has an annual budget of US$1.1 billion and is the global center for particle physics.

Dr. Gianotti led the ATLAS experiment at CERN that discovered the Higgs boson. ATLAS played a major role in the project that can help in explaining the formation of the physical universe.

She will be the 16th director-general and the first woman to lead the research center that has been in existence for 60 years.

Her fellow lady physicists including Melissa Franklin of Harvard University and Young-Kee Kim of the University of Chicago in Illinois are proud and thrilled by the appointment of Dr. Gianotti.

Dr. Gianotti became a CERN staff member in 1997. She became the spokeswoman for the 3,000 researchers working on ATLAS from March 2009 to February 2013.

As newly elected CERN director-general, she will work on the planned upgrade to the LHC and its detectors to be implemented from 2022 to 2024.

It seems she'll be leading at the most critical time for CERN as the center faces new challenges in particle physics, particularly the Higgs boson that will explain how all other fundamental particles get their mass.

TagsCERN, international physics research center, Fabiola Gianotti, Italian physicist, physics, higgs boson, God particle, particles, mass