Fabiola Gianotti's native smarts and intuitive people skills had earned her a spot managing a team of 3000 at the greatest research facility physicists have ever built. And all that was before this summer, when she and her CERN colleagues announced that, yes, they had well and truly captured the Higgs.
Forget Person of the Year–the discovery this summer by the Large Hadron Collider of the Higgs Boson particle was one of science’s greatest achievements.