Her last project, which lasted 13 years, led to the recent discovery of the top quark, the last of 12 fundamental building blocks of matter yet to be discovered.
Quarks, which make up neutrons and protons, can be studied by colliding particles together at high energy and analyzing the resultant matter.
Franklin and a group of about a hundred other physicists working at Harvard and the Fermilab worked to prove the existence of the last undiscovered quark, the "top" quark, by collecting two years' worth of data from collisions between protons and antiprotons.
One of her contributions to the quark project was to build 70 tons worth of detector to measure the behavior of particles resulting from quark disintegrations.
Franklin, who calls herself a completely "experimental physicist, says she enjoys building things and "making them work."
But she has also has a reputation for being an engaging teacher. "She's very humorous in class and tries to make us feel comfortable," says Forrest N. Anderson '98. For example, to demonstrate Newton's third law, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Franklin rode a cart fitted with a fire extinguisher to propel herself across the room.
In terms of innovative teaching techniques, Franklin is best known for the "zap labs" that she created for students of Physics 15b and 15c. Students are given large red tool-boxes filled with wires, batteries, clippers and soldering irons and are asked to construct various electronic circuits and devices. The labs are meant to teach students basic electronics through a series of hands-on experiments.
Franklin says she devised the labs in part because women "don't usually get any tinkering growing up." But she says she's discovered that most men at Harvard haven't grown up tinkering either.
Franklin maintains that physics is still a field that is difficult for women to enter.
"Some of the texts of physics are so flaming in gender bias it's as if the author was writing for an exclusively male audience," Franklin says. She cites problems in which a physicist must save a beautiful woman drowning in a river. The book with that particular problem in it was written in 1965, but Franklin says she believes the male bias continues.
"People teach physics the way they learned it, and it's passed down father to son," she says.
Nevertheless, Franklin admits that she didn't feel much discrimination as a physics graduate student at Stanford or as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto.
"I was the only woman in the class, but there were a lot of men who saw that women in physics were under-represented and were incredibly supportive," she says.
Nor did Franklin recall being very concerned about feminism in the '70s. "The male bias was so extreme there was no point spending time on it," she says.
On second thought, however, she says she recalls spraying huge "feminist anarchist" signs in red paint over the corridors and basements in Fermilab as an undergraduate.
So in some respects, Franklin has left her mark on high-energy physics in many ways. "Those signs are probably still up in the basements of Fermilab," she jokes.