Maria Girone is the Head of CERN openlab and a Principal Applied Scientist in CERN’s IT department. She holds a PhD in particle physics and has extensive expertise in computing for high-energy physics, having worked in scientific computing since 2002. Maria is widely recognized as a leader in driving the adoption of High-Performance Computing (HPC) within the high-energy physics community, bridging cutting-edge technology solutions with the needs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments.
Maria played a key role in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), founding and leading the operations coordination team responsible for core services and commissioning new tools. From 2014 to 2015, she was the software and computing coordinator for CMS, overseeing operations at about seventy computing centers worldwide. Prior to this, she was a Marie Curie fellow and research associate at Imperial College London, contributing to hardware development and data analysis for the LHCb and ALEPH experiments. From 2016 to early 2023, Maria served as CTO of CERN openlab, defining R&D strategies in computing architectures, HPC, and AI, and fostering partnerships with industry, the European Commission, and the LHC experiments. In 2022, she received a gold medal award by the “Brutium” association for her contributions to science.
A champion for inclusivity, Maria co-founded the IDEAS4HPC Association (Swiss Chapter of Women in HPC) and frequently speaks on panels promoting diversity in STEM.
