Fabiola Gianotti, the Italian physicist who first revealed to the world that the Higgs boson exists, will be the next director general of CERN, the laboratory where the elementary particle was discovered.

Gianotti will be the sixteenth person — and the first woman — to lead the European physics powerhouse, which is based at the Swiss-French border outside Geneva and recently celebrated its 60th anniversary. She was the spokesperson for ATLAS, one of two experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that discovered the Higgs boson, thus completing the standard model of particle physics.

“Fabiola is a superb scientist, led ATLAS to a great discovery and is respected and well-known around the world,” says Nigel Lockyer, the director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. “She fully understands that high-energy physics is a global enterprise, and CERN is at the centre.”

“Congratulations to Fabiola — and also congratulations to CERN, because I think CERN will be in very good hands,” said the current director general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer at a 4 November press conference in Geneva announcing the appointment. Gianotti will take over from Heuer on 1 January 2016