MELISSA FRANKLIN is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University. She is an experimental particle physicist who is studying proton collisions with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. She is a co-discoverer of the top quark and the Higgs boson. She works in a collaboration with more than three thousand physicists on ATLAS, where she studies properties of the vacuum, and searches for new particle interactions and new particles at the highest energies now available worldwide. In 1989 she joined the Harvard faculty, and in 1992 she became the first female tenured faculty member in the department of physics. Born and raised in Toronto, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.