Melissa Franklin

Happy Birthday Melissa Franklin! The Harvard University particle physicist was born in Edmonton, Canada in 1956. Franklin dropped out of her Toronto high school after ninth grade and started a free school. She entered the University of Toronto at age 16 and secured a summer job at Fermilab near Chicago to study the charm quark. After obtaining her PhD from Stanford, Franklin joined a group that was building a detector designed to discover the last and by far most massive of the six theorized quarks, the top quark. The detector was installed at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which was the world’s most powerful particle accelerator until the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In 1995 Franklin and colleagues announced that they had discovered the elusive top quark. Franklin has worked at Harvard since 1987 and was the first woman to become a tenured physics professor at the school. Since 2008 she has been part of the ATLAS collaboration, which along with the CMS team discovered the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012. (Photo credit: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 30 September 1956