Melissa Franklin

Melissa Franklin was the first woman to achieve tenure in the Physics department at Harvard. She’s an experimentalist who loves to build instruments and measure things, both wrists and ankles at dinner parties (!) and sub-atomic particles. She works on the giant ATLAS detector at CERN in Switzerland. She’s a very lively conversationalist and turned the tables on Alan a few times in this interview, including asking him if he’d "Push the Button?” You’ll hear how she got started in science, and why she thinks the best physicists are a little “wild,” sometimes behaving like “desperadoes.”