A&S alum and world-renowned physicist Melissa Franklin delivers Innis Alumni Lecture April 5

With a focus that spans history, science, literature and even culture, alum Melissa Franklin, an experimental particle physicist at Harvard University, will explore how long things last at this year’s free Innis Alumni Lecture.

“The lecture starts with things people can really understand easily and then it comes down to things I'm working on, which are things that may be less intuitive about elementary particles,” says Franklin, who earned her bachelor of science in 1977 while at Innis College.

“The Time It Takes” runs from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on April 5 at Innis Town Hall. The lecture is open to the public and will also be available online.

Franklin is a trailblazer in physics with an international reputation. She was co-discoverer of the top quark and the Higgs boson, and currently studies proton-proton collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider. Franklin occupies much of her time creating detectors that track elementary particles. She says she appreciates the work because it’s so multifaceted.

“You're not just always sitting at your computer analyzing data or writing code or something,” she says. “There are other people who just love sitting in one place doing the same thing over and over again. It's just not me.”

Franklin, whose family lives in Toronto, has deep roots in the city and a long history with the University of Toronto. As a teen, she left high school and helped create the SEED Alternative School. She and her peers studied out of the basement of what is now the Jewish Community Centre, where they recruited U of T professors to teach them.;

The lack of a high school diploma proved a challenge for Franklin, who was dead set on going to U of T.

“I don’t know why Innis let me in, but I’m glad they did,” Franklin says.

While at A&S, Franklin studied a wide variety of subjects.

“I was going to be a great writer, a great philosopher. I was going to be an incredible filmmaker, all of those things,” she says. “When I went to graduate school, I was hoping I wouldn’t become a physicist or a professor. I wanted to be somebody much more interesting than that.”

Starting university at 16, Franklin found herself behind the curve. Although she maintained her diverse interests, it was the physics department that became her home at U of T. Franklin credits the individual attention she received there with catching up to her classmates.

“You think at the University of Toronto, you're not going to get that kind of attention because it's a really big school, but it really seemed like the physics department was a place where people would help you,” Franklin says.

“The physics education you get at University of Toronto is as good as anywhere in the major places in North America. It's really good. And the people there were incredibly wonderful.”

After receiving her doctor of philosophy degree in physics from Stanford University and working as a post-doctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Franklin went to Harvard University. There, Franklin became the first woman to receive tenure in the physics department. She served as chair of the department from 2010 to 2014.

Franklin says she’s been happy to see progress as more women get involved in STEM, even if it’s not as fast as she’d like.

“It's a lot better. And not only that, the women in physics are a lot smarter too. Smarter than I was.”  

Franklin says she tries to create an environment where underrepresented students feel as though they can bring “their whole selves” to the classroom.

Most of Franklin’s out-of-office endeavours focus on bringing science to wider audiences. She runs the Harvard Science Book talks, which promote popular science authors and books.

“I want to get science out there,” Franklin says. “I have that mission.”