The Senate of Bologna appointed Bassi to the Chair of Experimental Physics at the Istituto delle Scienze, a world first for a woman.
In 1776, near the end of her long career, Laura Bassi achieved perhaps her most significant institutional honor: appointment to the Chair of Experimental Physics at the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, granted by the Senate of Bologna and the University of Bologna. This made her the first woman in the world to hold a university chair specifically in physics, and specifically in the experimental branch of the discipline.
This appointment came after more than four decades of teaching, research, and public demonstration work, during which Bassi had built one of the most respected experimental physics laboratories in Italy, often in collaboration with her husband, physician and fellow scientist Giuseppe Veratti. Her home laboratory became a renowned meeting place for scholars, hosting demonstrations of electrical phenomena and other cutting-edge experimental physics of the era.
The chair represented full institutional recognition of what had, in practice, long been true: Bassi was one of the most capable and productive physicists in Bologna, having authored numerous papers on hydraulics, mechanics, and electricity. It elevated her beyond the honorary and semi-restricted professorship she had held since 1732 into a formally endowed and prestigious academic post with genuine teaching authority and standing among the leading scientific figures of the Istituto delle Scienze.
Her appointment to this chair is regarded by historians of science as a capstone achievement, cementing her legacy as a trailblazer who broke through nearly every institutional barrier facing women in science during the Enlightenment.