"I’ve always been interested in the building process," says Gregg Franklin, a Carnegie Mellon physics professor who notes that he is always constructing things, tangibly as an amateur woodworker and more abstractly as a physicist. "In experimental physics," he says, "we’re always building and developing something." As the new head of the Department of Physics, Franklin is also building quite a career. He has authored or co-authored more than 60 publications and has served as spokesperson for several international physics collaborations.

—Christen Stroh