LUCIA VOTANO

“SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH” Award

Physics is the science which studies and describes natural phenomena and, when possible, recreates them with experiments and studies them measuring the quantities which determine them, in order to discover the relations between phenomena and the laws which govern them.

Lucia is one of the brilliant minds of physics, a science which seems to be considered abstract by many people.

She has been the first woman to be the leader of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the  National Institute for Nuclear Physics.

In the Laboratory she has chaired the OPERA Committee – an experiment which has proved the existence of the phenomenon known as “neutrino oscillation”, by using a neutrino beam which was produced at CERN and then sent through the Earth to the Laboratory.
She is now involved in the JUNO Experiment, the last frontier in neutrino physics, an enormous apparatus which is still under construction in the South of China and will be operational only in 2021.
She is the coordinator of a thousand physics coming from all over the world, who have worked on twenty important projects – one such is the project that, together with the CERN, proved the existence of Higgs boson