was born in Munich, Germany on 16 September 1921. Her mother Ilse Maria Martius (née Sperling) was Jewish and an art historian and her father, Albrecht Martius, an ethnographer, came from an old German Protestant family. Franklin once stated that her father was an "Africanist." Because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, her parents tried to send their only child to school in Britain when World War II broke out, but the British refused to issue a student visa to anyone under 18. Ursula studied chemistry and physics at Berlin University until she was expelled by the Nazis. Her parents were interned in concentration camps while Franklin herself was sent to a forced labour camp and repaired bombed buildings. The family survived The Holocaust and was reunited in Berlin after the war. Academic career Franklin decided to study science because she went to school during a time when the teaching of history was censored. "I remember a real subversive pleasure," she told an interviewer many years later, "that there was no word of authority that could change either the laws of physics or the conduct of mathematics." In 1948, Franklin received her PhD in experimental physics at the Technical University of Berlin. She began to look for opportunities to leave Germany after realizing there was no place there for someone fundamentally opposed to militarism and oppression. Franklin moved to Canada after being offered the Lady Davis postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto in 1949. She then worked for 15 years (from 1952 to 1967) as first a research fellow and then as a senior research scientist at the Ontario Research Foundation. In 1967, Franklin became a researcher and associate professor at the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science University of Toronto's Faculty of Engineering where she was an expert in metallurgy and materials science. She was promoted to full professor in 1973 and was given the designation of University Professor in 1984, becoming the first female professor to receive the university's highest honour. She was appointed professor emerita in 1987, a title she retained until her death. She served as director of the university's Museum Studies Program from 1987 to 1989, was named a Fellow of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 1988, and a Senior Fellow of Massey College in 1989. Scientific research Franklin was a pioneer in the field of archaeometry, which applies modern