Franklin, Melissa Eve Bronwen
Oral history interview with Melissa Franklin, 2020 August 7.
Interview with Melissa Franklin, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard. Franklin notes her affiliation with the ATLAS experiment, and she discusses the importance of remote data analysis from CERN which is possible in the current mandates of remote work. Franklin recounts her childhood in Edmonton, then Vancouver, and then Toronto, and she discusses the alternative educational experiences she pursued through high school. She describes her undergraduate experience at the University of Toronto and her decision to study physics and the summers she spent at Fermilab making a tagged photon beam. Franklin discusses her graduate work at Stanford, where she was motivated to work at SLAC with Martin Perl and then Gary Feldman. She describes her postdoctoral appointment at Berkeley working on an experiment at Fermilab, and her decision to join the faculty at the University of Illinois before accepting an offer to become a junior fellow and then an assistant professor at Harvard. Franklin describes her work on the CDF at Fermilab and measuring the mass of the W and the Z, and she surveys her style as a mentor to graduate students. She explains how she became involved with ATLAS and her interest in fundamental questions like the possible coupling of the Higgs to dark matter. Franklin describes her efforts to make the Harvard physics department a more caring place for postdocs, graduate students and support staff, and why she believes physics education research needs to be more rigorously incorporated at the department level. At the end of the interview, Franklin reflects on the significance of the discovery of the top quark, and she conveys her ambition to build a very small accelerator with a very high energy.
Melissa Franklin is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Franklin pursued her graduate studies at Stanford and a postdoctoral appointment at UC Berkeley. Before coming to Harvard, Franklin was on faculty at the University of Illinois. She also works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
Feldman, Gary J.
Feynman, Richard P. (Richard Phillips), 1918-1988
Franklin, Melissa Eve Bronwen
Gaillard, Mary K.
Georgi, Howard
Lederman, Leon M.
Mayer, Maria Goeppert, 1906-1972
Perl, Martin L., 1927-2014
European Organization for Nuclear Research
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Harvard University.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford University
University of California, Berkeley
University of Illinois at Chicago. Department of Physics
Colliders (Nuclear physics).
Dark matter (Astronomy)
Higgs bosons.
Linear accelerators.
Particle physics. gtt
Quarks.
Spectrum analysis
W bosons.
Women in physics
Z bosons
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Zierler, David, 1979- interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA