The woman blazing a cosmic trail in Australian science.

Elisabetta Barberio remembers playing on the streets of a remote Italian village as a little girl, her sense of the world unfurling.

“I could go around the village and everyone knew me,” the University of Melbourne physicist recalled.

“I was quite free and I never felt cast or put in a particular box.”

It came as a shock when her scientist mother and doctor father moved the family to a small city apartment in the Calabria region of southern Italy.

But within those walls, she opened up her parents’ textbooks and saw something of her future.

“I was curious, always curious.”

Her mother encouraged her to pursue a career rather than marriage, a revolutionary view at the time, which led the future professor to study across Europe.

She was part of a large team of physicists involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson, known as the God particle for its once mysterious role in creating mass and forming the foundations of existence.

“It was like Christmas, waiting for a present and not knowing what the present is,” Professor Barberio said of the research.

“There was adrenaline, like when you see things under the tree and you want to open the box, but you have to wait.”

That childlike sense of wonder about the universe continues to drive her, as director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics.

While she has witnessed significant shifts in science, slow societal change has been a source of frustration.

Men in the industry have doubted her talents and questioned her leadership at various points in her career.

The only way forward, Prof Barberio believes, is sharing a love of science with more women, just as her mother did.