Happy New Year to you all, I wish you and your families and friends a wonderful 2024.

2024 will be a very special year for CERN, as the Lab will turn 70. This is a remarkable milestone, and we will be celebrating it with our partner institutes and all our collaborators in our Member States, Associate Member States and beyond.

Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General, wishes the CERN community a happy 2024 (Video: CERN)

Throughout the year, we will demonstrate how, over the past seven decades, CERN has been at the forefront of scientific knowledge and technological innovation, and a model for training and education, collaboration, open science and inspiration of citizens around the world.

We are the proud stewards of an extraordinary heritage, which we will honour in many ways. But this anniversary is also a great opportunity to look forward. We will be stoking the enthusiasm of people of all ages by showing how CERN’s beautiful journey of exploration into the fundamental laws of nature and the fundamental constituents of matter and the Universe is set to continue into the future.

This year’s celebrations are also very much a recognition of CERN’s strongest asset, its personnel and its worldwide community – this means each and every one of you, and the thousands of people who, with their work through the decades, have made CERN a unique place.

Today, we look back at CERN’s great accomplishments with pride and look forward to its bright future with enthusiasm.