During WWII, Elda Anderson (1899-1961) worked on the Manhattan Project in the Office of Scientific Research and Development at Princeton University. In 1943, she was recruited from Princeton to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. At Los Alamos, Anderson created the first sample of uranium-235 for testing and experimentation…

Nathaniel Furman worked on the Manhattan Project at Princeton University where he led the Analytical Group. This research focused on identifying uranium sources for nuclear weapons and was organized under the "Madison Square Area" of the "Manhattan District, Corps of Engineers." Researchers worked to identify uranium in ores and to purify…

Stanley Hall (1924 - present) was recruited to work on Princeton’s cyclotron as a machinist in 1942 when he was just 18 years old. After just a few weeks of working at Princeton the Princeton cyclotron group was asked to move to New Mexico to work on a recently-installed cyclotron at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Stanley Hall…

Floy Agnes "Aggie" Lee was a biologist and member of the Santa Clara Pueblo. Lee originally aspired to join the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) after graduating from the University of New Mexico. Unfortunately, the program was disbanded shortly before she would have started. Instead, Lee went to work on the Manhattan Project at Los…

Pheobe Smith worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1940s.[1] limited information on Pheobe's involvement at Oak Ridge exists. However, some insight to what work Phoebe may have done at Oak Ridge can be gained through her childhood friend, Wynona Arrington Butner, whom she recruited…

Henry De Wolf Smyth was a professor of Physics at Princeton University. Smyth began working on the Manhattan Project in early 1941 and was widely involved, contributing to various theoretical and practical questions and challenges. During World War…

Hugh Stott Taylor (1890-1974) was an English chemist and Professor of Chemistry at Princeton. During WWI, Taylor returned to his home country of England to work in Munitions Inventions. He returned to Princeton where he helped create the Department of Chemical Engineering. Under Taylor’s direction, Princeton offered its first…

John Wheeler (1911-2008) was a leading theoretical physicist and Professor of Physics at Princeton from 1938-1976. Wheeler was central to the development of both the atomic and hydrogen bombs. After earning a doctoral degree in Physics from Johns Hopkins University, Wheeler worked closely with Niels Bohr at the University of…

Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) joined the Princeton faculty in 1930. In 1936, he developed Princeton’s first atom-smashing cyclotron to study nuclear properties of uranium. In 1942 Wigner left Princeton to work on the Manhattan project at the University of Chicago where he played a significant role in the creation of the atomic bomb…

In the early 1940s, Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) became the first woman hired as a faculty member by Princeton’s physics department. Only a few years later in 1944, she left Princeton to work on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University. Wu worked to improve Geiger counters and develop better methods…

Herbert York (1921-2009), a Mohawk Physicist, began working on the Manhattan project at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in California. He then moved to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the Y-12 Plant where he worked on electromagnetic separation of uranium-235.

After the war, York served as the first director of the…