Leona Woods, American Physicist

Woods at the University of Chicago in 1946. Leona Woods (August 9, 1919 - November 10, 1986) was an American physicist who helped build the first... more

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Leona Woods, American Physicist

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Woods at the University of Chicago in 1946. Leona Woods (August 9, 1919 - November 10, 1986) was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb. At age 23, she was the youngest and only female member of the team which built and experimented with the world's first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, in a project led by her mentor Enrico Fermi. She was instrumental in the construction and then utilization of geiger counters for analysis during experimentation. She was the only woman present when the reactor went critical. She worked with Fermi on the Manhattan Project. After the war, she became a fellow at Fermi's Institute for Nuclear Studies. She later worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and New York University, where she became a professor in 1962. Her research involved high-energy physics, astrophysics and cosmology. In 1966 she divorced Marshall and married Nobel laureate Willard Libby. She became a professor at the University of Colorado, and a staff member at RAND Corporation. She died in 1986, at the age of 67, from an anesthesia induced stroke.

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April 15th, 2019