‘Physics was paradise’
Melissa Franklin is sixth in the Experience series, after Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Martha Minow, Steven Pinker, Walter Willett, and E.O. Wilson. Interviews with Stephen Greenblatt, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Helen Vendler will appear in coming weeks. Melissa Franklin, an experimental particle physicist, has had a career of firsts, some scientific, some social. She was part of teams that discovered two elementary particles: the top quark at Fermilab and the Higgs boson at CERN. In 1992, she became the first woman to earn tenure in Harvard’s Physics Department. Chess and sports helped to shape Franklin’s youth in Toronto, along with constant reading. At 16, she enrolled at the University of Toronto and spent her post-freshman-year summer as an intern at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. For graduate and postdoctoral work she was at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley; in 1989, she became an assistant professor at Harvard. Franklin, 57, is the...