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Melissa Franklin - The time it takes: My first role model and how she and I are both interested in measuring the time things take to happen

 Deirdre Shoemaker

Talk details

Talk abstract

From the speaker:
"Maria Goeppert Mayer, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, calculated how long atoms took to decay and understood the reasons some were stable. I am interested in whether there are new elementary particles which have long lifetimes being produced in the proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. In this lecture I will discuss the work of Goeppert-Mayer done before 1960 and the work we are doing presently at CERN."

Presenter

Melissa Franklin

Melissa Franklin is an experimental particle physicist who 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 bachelor of science degree from the University of Toronto and her PhD 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 2010-2014.