Fabiola Gianotti received a PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Milan in 1989 and joined CERN as a research physicist in 1994. From 2009 to 2013, she was the head (“spokesperson”) of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It was during this period that the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.

She was appointed Director-General of CERN for a first term of office starting in 2016 and renewed for a second term starting in 2021. She is the first woman to have held this role, and the first Director-General to be reappointed for a full second term. She has received 15 honorary doctoral degrees from universities across the world and is a foreign member of eight academies of science worldwide. She was ranked fifth in Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue in 2012. In 2013, she was a joint recipient of both the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Italian Physical Society’s Enrico Fermi Prize, and in 2019 she received the Tate Medal for International Leadership from the American Institute of Physics.

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Ulrike Diebold is a professor of surface physics at TU Wien and serves as the vice president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW).  She conducts research in experimental surface science with an emphasis on metal oxides.  She is particularly interested in the atomic-scale properties of these complex materials, and in unraveling their (defect)structure/reactivity relationship. She is the recipient of two ERC Advanced Grants, the coordinator of the FWF-funded Coordinated Research Center TACO, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Austrian Cluster of Excellence ‘Materials for Energy Conversion’, MECS.
Throughout his distinguished career, he has been the recipient of numerous prestigious honors, including Austria’s highest research accolade, the Wittgenstein Prize awarded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF); the Arthur W. Adamson Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Surface Chemistry, presented by the American Chemical Society; the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in recognition of outstanding contributions to international scientific collaboration; and an Honorary Doctorate from Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic.

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Verena Ringler is a European Diplomacy and Governance Innovator who advocates for contact and cooperation across sectors, disciplines, and cultures, showcasing the added value and impact of such formats in times of change. CERN to her serves as a powerful inspiration way beyond the natural sciences due to the ambition, audacity, and cooperative culture it embodies.

Verena promotes forward-looking leadership as 2025 EU Climate Pact Ambassador and as Director of European Commons, a boutique Think Tank. In the past two decades, she devised and oversaw numerous cutting-edge endeavours at the interface of diplomacy, science, and society. Verena also worked in EU diplomacy in the Balkans, and as an editor at Foreign Policy magazine. She serves on the advisory boards of several policy organizations and regularly appears in the media and the Club of Venice. She holds registered trademarks on new strategy development formats, including the Situation Room™.

Florian Aigner is a physicist and one of Austria’s leading voices in science communication. With a PhD in theoretical physics and a flair for storytelling, he has authored several popular science books and is a frequent contributor to media and public discourse. In 2017, he published the popular science book "Chance, the Universe and You," which was awarded Science Book of the Year in the category "Science and Technology" in 2018. The radio station Ö1 has been broadcasting his podcast "Aigner's Universe" since February 2021.

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