Fabiola Gianotti, the newly elected Spokesperson of ATLAS

On 11 July Fabiola Gianotti was elected by the ATLAS Collaboration as its future Spokesperson.

Her term of office will start on 1 March 2009 and will last for two years. She will take over from Peter Jenni who has been ATLAS Spokesperson since its formalization in 1992.

Three distinguished physicists stood as candidates for this election: Fabiola Gianotti (CERN), Marzio Nessi (CERN), and Leonardo Rossi (INFN Genova, Italy).

The nomination process started on 30 October 2007, with a general email sent to the ATLAS collaboration calling for nominations, and closed on 25 January 2008. Any ATLAS physicist could nominate a candidate, and 24 nominees were proposed before the ATLAS search committee narrowed them to the final three.

After the voting process, which concluded the ATLAS general meeting in Bern, the Collaboration Board greeted the result with warm applause.