Fabiola Gionotti

It is rare that someone from science is one of the finalists for Time Magazine's Person of the Year. It is even rarer that it is a physicist AND a woman. That is what Fabiola Gionotti has accomplished for her effort at the LHC leading up to the apparent discovery of the Higgs.

The announcement caused the kind of global sensation you don’t always see in response to a scientific discovery, and three names earned an equally unusual level of fame — Gianotti, who headed one of the experiments that confirmed the Higgs; her colleague Joe Incandela, who led the other; and Rolf Heuer, the research director of CERN. It was Gianotti who perhaps received the most attention, principally for her leadership role and her manifest gifts but occasionally for a reason as predictable as it is misguided: her gender. Physics is a male-dominated field, and the assumption is that a woman has to overcome hurdles and face down biases that men don’t.

Read her story at Time's website before it disappears.

Zz.