The daughter of two chemists, Ruth Comroe and Eugene Rosenbaum, she grew up in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania.

She received her B.A in physics in 1959 from Cornell University and pursued graduate studies in physics at the University of Illinois where she earned a master's degree in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1965.

[1][2] Shortly after earning her Ph.D., she worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the IBM research laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland from 1965 to 1967, before returning to America to serve as a physics professor at Indiana University for 18 years.

[3] Franz has published a number of high-profile articles on condensed matter physics,[4] most notably related to the theoretical calculations of electron state wave functions in systems undergoing metal-insulator transitions.

[2] She is past Secretary General of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.