Melissa Franklin is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Chair of the Department of Physics. She is an experimental particle physicist who studies proton-proton collisions produced by Large Hadron Collider. She has worked on the Collider Detector at Fermilab since 1983. She is also a collaborator on the ATLAS experiment where she works in collaboration with over 3000 physicists. She is presently studying the properties of the Higgs boson. Professor Franklin, born and raised in Canada, received her B.Sc. from the University of Toronto and her Doctorate from Stanford University. She worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Champagne/Urbana and was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, before joining the Harvard faculty in 1989.