Lucia Votano

, a physicist and associate research director at INFN, has conducted research at CERN and DESY-Hamburg and was director of the Underground lab at Gran Sasso, where experiments of global importance are conducted on neutrinos and dark matter. Here she was among the key figures in the discovery of neutrino oscillation with the Opera experiment, which used a neutrino beam fired from CERN in Geneva to Gran Sasso. She is currently taking part in the Juno experiment, an enormous underground apparatus undergoing construction in southern China. She has received a number of prizes and was honored as knight commander by the Italian president of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano for her work in the field of science.

In 2012 her book Il fantasma dell’universo. Che cos’è il neutrino was published by Carocci.