Melissa Franklin is an experimental particle physicist and the Department Chair and Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University.[1] While working at the Fermi National Acceleration Laboratory in Chicago, her team found some of the first evidence for the existence of the top quark. Franklin was the first woman ever to gain tenure in the Harvard Physics Department.[2] As of 2010[update], she is researching proton-antiproton collisions.
Franklin grew up in Toronto, Canada, and attended SEED School (Toronto) and the University of Toronto. She earned her physics PhD from Stanford University in 1982 and later worked at Fermilab in Chicago, before coming to Harvard.