Experts
Melissa Franklin
Professor of Physics, Harvard University
A conversation with the Harvard Professor of Physics. Read More
Physicist Melissa Franklin recommends you avoid trying to control where your ideas take you—instead, let them do their own thing. Read More
Physicist Melissa Franklin would love to have a dream dinner with Samuel Beckett or Richard Feynman, but she’s afraid she’d get nervous and make a fool of herself. Read More
Melissa Franklin stays up at night concerned mainly about how her son is doing in Little League; though she worries about bigger problems, they aren’t tangible enough to make her lose sleep. Read More
Empirical scientists won’t stop making fun of popular science icons like Brian Greene, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love them. Read More
Supercolliders are expensive to build and maintain, slow to get going, become obsolete as soon as a new one is built, and are shooting for discoveries that even physicists are unsure of. So why should taxpayers foot the bill? Particle physicist Melissa Franklin makes the case. Read More
Will the new Large Hadron Collider create an earth-consuming black hole? Highly unlikely, says the Harvard physicist, but if it did, “it wouldn’t be so bad." Read More
Why is a group of brilliant scientists spending millions to find the smallest particles in the universe? As it turns out, they will be able to teach us a lot about our own origins. Physicist Melissa Franklin explains how. Read More
Melissa Franklin had her share of challenges n the male-dominated world of physics: colleagues made passes at her, they asked her not talk, and were generally “less evolved socially.” She explains how she preserved to become the Harvard Physics department’s first tenure woman. Read More
Melissa Franklin never had any intention of becoming one of the world’s leading particle physicists. She says went into the field because “she wasn’t smart enough” to do anything else, and was lured by having the chance to build things, play with computers, and philosophize all in one job. Read More
About Melissa Franklin
Melissa Franklin is the first woman ever to achieve tenure in the Harvard physics department. She is an experimental particle physicist who has been working on the Collider Detector at Fermilab, an experiment designed generally to study the collisions of protons and anti-protons at the highest energies currently possible. In January, she will be working at the new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.