Melissa Franklin, Professor of Physics at Harvard University, received her BS from the University of Toronto(1977), and PhD from Stanford University(1982). She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

She is an experimental particle physicist working on the CDF experiment at Fermilab, part of the team that discovered the sixth and final quark, the top quark. She is the subject of a PBS documentary, Discovering Women: High Energy.

Melissa Franklin will discuss how we probe the smallest structures and the slightest asymmetries in nature. Using particle accelerators as microscopes we can peer at things which are a billionth of a trillionth of a meter in length, depth or breadth. She will discuss what we have measured and how we did it. We can also use these machines to produce new particles, and interactions, which may lead us to understand the perfect symmetries in a world which is a close approximation to our own.