Dr. Melissa Franklin

Biography

Melissa Franklin is a Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard University. She is an experimental particle physicist who studies proton-proton collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and collaborates with over 3000 physicists on the ATLAS experiment. Melissa was a co-discoverer of the top quark and the Higgs boson and is currently focused on studying the properties of the Higgs boson while searching for new physics beyond the Standard Model. Originally from Canada, she earned her Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto and her Doctorate from Stanford University. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, she served as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1989, she joined the faculty at Harvard and became the first woman to receive tenure in the Physics department, where she later served as the Chair from 2010 to 2014.

Research Interests