Join us on April 5 for the 2023 Innis Alumni Lecture with Professor Melissa Franklin (BSc ’77 Innis), Harvard University’s trailblazing experimental particle physicist.
In her lecture, “The Time It Takes,” Professor Franklin will reflect on her work, her first role model, and their obsession with measuring how long things take to decay — and how that tells a story about the universe.
David Curtin, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Particle Physics and assistant professor in U of T’s Department of Physics, will moderate the Q&A that follows the lecture.
This free, public lecture is offered in person (Town Hall) and online (Vimeo). Please complete the corresponding registration form below.
Melissa Franklin is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University.
An experimental particle physicist, she studies proton-proton collisions produced by Large Hadron Collider (LHC). She is a collaborator on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC where she works in collaboration with over 3,000 physicists.
Franklin was co-discoverer of the top quark and the Higgs boson. She is presently studying the properties of the Higgs boson and searching for new physics beyond the Standard Model.
Professor Franklin, born and raised in Canada, received her BSc from Innis College at 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.
In 1992, she became the first woman to receive tenure in the physics department, and she served as chair of the physics department from 2010-14.
David Curtin is Assistant Professor in U of T’s Department of Physics and Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Particle Physics. Curtin is a high energy phenomenologist, interested in finding and analyzing theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model. His current areas of active research include, amongst others, the Higgs Boson, long-lived particles, the Hierarchy Problem, and cosmology. Prior to joining U of T, Curtin completed his PhD at Cornell University and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Maryland and Stony Brook University.