Melissa Franklin
First tenured female professor of physics, Harvard University

As one can tell from Melissa Franklin's photo, Melissa dances to the beat of a different drummer. Franklin is Harvard University's first tenured female professor of physics. She has brought fresh perspectives to a field usually dominated by men. "Discovering Women," a PBS series profiling women scientists, describes her as "an eclectic innovator with a somewhat quirky sense of humor and a passion for unconventional music." It is notably unusual for a woman to be part of Franklin's field. Melissa Franklin is a notably unusual woman.

Franklin is on a quest for the smallest particles, the smallest building blocks of matter. She has been a key contributor in constructing a multimillion dollar, 140 ton microscope in order to see and measure these particles. The "detector," is housed at Chicago's Fermi Lab.

Growing up in Toronto, Canada, Franklin would stay up all night building things. Her mother was passionately involved in her own work which instilled in Franklin the desire to be passionate about her own work and to be around those who are passionate in whatever they do. She claims that she only deals with insanely passionate people.

Franklin has overcome many obstacles. She claims that the higher the level of responsibility in her field, the larger the power struggles are with her male colleagues. She has encountered great resistance when telling older men what to do. Franklin is teaching these men in her field to treat her as an equal by displaying again and again innovations and insights which stem from her unique perspective.

Franklin offers a fresh perspective in her field while teaching and inspiring at the same time. Her main objective in teaching is to stimulate and inspire students to want to learn on their own.

According to Discovering Women, Franklin's "determination and hard work paid off recently, when she and colleagues found evidence of the existence of the Top quark-one of the invisible, subatomic particles that has long eluded high energy physicists."