Fabiola Gianotti

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, when thousands of bloggers all over the world will publish a post on a woman in technology to highlight the contribution women are making what has traditionally been a male field.

Just to be perverse I've chosen a woman working in subnuclear physics, which is about as far as you can get from an applied science. But Fabiola Gianotti is in charge of one of the most impressive pieces of technology ever built – the ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The size of a five storey building yet able to detect particle trajectories with micrometre precision, it required over 2,000 scientists and engineers to assemble its hundreds of millions of components. Rather than searching for a particular particle of a particular energy, ATLAS is designed to detect the unexpected, integrating 100 million different electronic signals in order to detect any of the myriad particles that may be created in high energy collisions in the LHC.

Fabiola Gianotti had originally planned a career in music, and trained as a pianist at the Milan Conservatory, before deciding that a career in physics could better address her fascination with the big questions of how the universe worked. She did a PhD in experimental sub-nuclear physics at the University of Milan and joined CERN, a remarkable collaboration between physicists of 37 different countries, in 1987. On the first of March this year she was elected head of ATLAS at CERN.

She is disappointed that physics is seen as a male subject and is quoted as saying: "Women have obstacles in the field for merely social reasons. Research does not allow you to make life plans. And the difficulties for women with a family are many. Something should be done, for instance, to develop more structures that would enable women with children to go through a physics career without too many obstacles, starting with nursery schools."

See other bloggers' posts for Ada Lovelace day at:

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Ada Lovelace day

Born in 1815, Ada Lovelace was the world's first computer programmer. The daughter of the mad, bad and dangerous Lord Byron, her mother attempted to quash any poetic tendencies the young Ada may have had by ensuring that, unusually for a girl, she received a thorough education in mathematics. From the age of 17 she corresponded frequently with the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage on matters of logic and algebra, and he eventually employed her to translate the works of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on the subject of the Analytical Engine. This she did, adding a volume of notes in which she first recognised the potential of a general purpose computer. Although the Analytical Engine was never built, she wrote a number of programs for it. Not bad for a woman with pretty severe hypothermia by the looks of it.

Women in IT are still frequently overlooked or suffer discrimination, and so in an attempt to draw attention to their contribution the 24th of March has been designated Ada Lovelace day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. So far 1,279 people have signed a pledge to publish a blog post on the 24th about a woman in technology they admire.

I have a blog, and am also of the Feminazical persuasion, so the idea obviously appealed to me and I plan to publish a post on the 24th of March. Like many of my less sensible ideas I decided to do this when drunk having misread the description as being about women in science and technology, and have now realised in the cold light of day that it's just about women in technology. This is annoying as I could have written about a woman in science in my sleep but will now have to do *gasp!* some research.

If anyone else with a blog wants to join in, there's a Facebook event too.