Leona Woods Biography

Leona Woods Marshall who later came to be known as Leona Woods Marshall Libby was an American physicist. She was born on August 9, 1919 in La Grange, Illinois. Her studies culminated with the achievement of a doctoral degree in Molecular Spectroscopy from the University of Chicago after which she was recruited into the famous Enrico Fermi’s team to work on the Manhattan project. The Manhattan project was a research and development undertaking during the Second World War that produced the first nuclear weapons. Fermi’s team worked on the first nuclear reactor which was called Chicago pile number one (CP-1) to try and understand how a chain reaction worked. In this team, Leona contributed to the construction of the boron trifluoride detectors …show more content…
Subsequently, on the 2nd of December, 1942 the CP-1 went critical to produce the first self-sustainimg nuclear fission reaction (Howes & Herzenberg, 2003; Woolbright, Schumacher, & Michonova-Alexova, 2014). Leona Woods was the only woman from Fermi’s group present to witness this initial successful experiment. Thereafter, the first reactor was dismantled and reassembled at the Metallurgical Laboratory, Argonne Lab Site A, in a more remote area off University of Chicago campus. Leona Woods continued working on the project Chicago Pile number two at Site A. In the course of the Manhattan project, she met John Marshall a coworker and fellow physicist. The two got married in July 1943. Soon after, Leona became pregnant with her first son. She managed to hide her pregnancy successfully under the baggy work clothes until two days to giving birth in 1944. This was to avoid being kicked out of the project work. Later, John Marshall would be sent to Hanford. Leona Woods Marshall joined him and together they oversaw the operation and construction of the plutonium production reactors. Subsequently, she helped solve the problem of xenon poisoning at the Hanford plutonium production