1. Melissa Eve Bronwen Franklin was born on September 30,1956 and is a Canadian experimental particle physicist and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University.
14 Facts About Melissa Franklin
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In 1992, Franklin became the first woman to receive tenure in the physics department at Harvard University and she served as chair of the department from 2010 to 2014.
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In 1993, Melissa Franklin was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.
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Melissa Franklin is a member of the CDF and ATLAS collaborations.
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Melissa Franklin was born in Edmonton, Alberta and grew up first in Vancouver, British Columbia and then Toronto, Ontario, where her family moved in 1962.
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Melissa Franklin's father, Stephen Franklin, was a British-born journalist who worked as drama critic for the Ottawa Journal and later as staff writer and editor for Weekend magazine.
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Melissa Franklin's mother, Elsa, was a television producer as well as Canadian author Pierre Berton's manager and literary agent.
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Melissa Franklin dropped out of high school to form an alternative school with friends, SEED Alternative School, and later attended the Lycee Francais Charles de Gaulle in London.
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Melissa Franklin took courses in physics, religious studies and philosophy at the University of Toronto, graduating with a bachelor of science in 1977.
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Melissa Franklin earned her physics PhD from Stanford University in 1982 with a thesis titled "Selected studies of charmonium decay" under the supervision of Gary Feldman and Martin Perl, working with the school's linear accelerator, SLAC.
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Melissa Franklin did postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley in the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
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For over a decade, Melissa Franklin traveled between Boston and Chicago every few weeks, to check on and fix equipment at Fermilab.
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Since the 1990s, Melissa Franklin has been a frequent guest on the CBC Radio science program Quirks and Quarks.
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Melissa Franklin has been a frequent lecturer and "dramatic read[er]" in the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremonies and other events of the Annals of Improbable Research.