[7][8][9] Gianotti found her passion for scientific research after reading a biography on Marie Curie.

[18] Gianotti also appeared in the 2013 documentary film Particle Fever about work at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

[19] During Gianotti's time as project leader and spokesperson of ATLAS, the experiment was one of two involved in the observation of the Higgs boson.

Until the observation, the Higgs boson was a purely theoretical part of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Gianotti's deep understanding of the ATLAS experiment, and her leadership, were recognised as major factors in the discovery.

[citation needed] Some of her most notable publications include "Observation of a New Particle in the Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC", where CERN presented the Higgs boson observation,[22] "Searches for supersymmetry at high-energy colliders: the past, the present and the future" in the IOP Science, New Journal of Physics,[23] and "Calorimetry for particle physics" in the APS Physics Journal.

Gianotti is helping break down barriers the male-dominated field created for aspiring female scientists.

[37] When CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, some controversy sprang from Gianotti's use of the Comic Sans typeface in the presentation of the results.

[46] Alby Reid, a physicist, started an online petition calling for Microsoft to change the name of the font to Comic Cerns.

She has never been married; in a profile on Gianotti in The New York Times, the Dutch physicist Rende Steerenberg described her as someone who "has dedicated her life to physics... sure, she has made sacrifices.