24 Facts About Leona Woods

Leona Harriet Woods, later known as Leona Woods Marshall and Leona Woods Marshall Libby, was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb.

In particular, Woods was instrumental in the construction and then utilization of geiger counters for analysis during experimentation.

Leona Woods was the only woman present when the reactor went critical.

Leona Woods worked with Fermi on the Manhattan Project, and she subsequently helped evaluate the cross section of xenon, which had poisoned the first Hanford production reactor when it began operation.

Leona Woods later worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and New York University, where she became a professor in 1962.

Leona Woods moved as a professor to the University of Colorado, and was a staff member at RAND Corporation.

Leona Woods was a strong advocate of food irradiation as a means of killing harmful bacteria.

Leona Woods graduated from Lyons Township High School in La Grange at 14, and received her BS in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1938, at the age of 18.

Leona Woods met Herbert Anderson, who was working for Enrico Fermi.

Anderson discovered that Leona Woods was adept with vacuum technology from her research, and as soon as her PhD was finished, he hired her to work with the boron trifluoride detectors used to measure neutron flux.

Fermi's group constructed a nuclear reactor known as Chicago Pile-1 under the stands of Stagg Field, the University's abandoned football stadium, where Leona Woods had once played squash.

Walter Zinn did not want a woman involved in the dirty work of placing the graphite blocks, but Leona Woods had plenty of work to do with the detectors and thermocouples, and used a small stack of graphite of her own to measure the effects of a radium-beryllium source on manganese foil to obtain a measure of the neutron cross section in order to calibrate the detectors.

Leona Woods was the only woman physicist in Enrico's group.

Leona Woods considered that the important thing was that the solder was done correctly.

Leona Woods covered up her pregnant belly with her baggy denim work clothes.

Leona Woods speculated that a water leak was the problem, rather than a radioactive poison.

Leona Woods's second child, John Marshall III, was born in 1949.

Leona Woods then became a staff member at RAND Corporation, where she worked until 1976.

Leona Woods later joined him at UCLA, where she became a visiting professor of environmental studies, engineering, engineering archaeology, mechanical aerospace and nuclear engineering in 1973.

Leona Woods proposed that, instead of it being sprayed with malathion, fruit affected by the Mediterranean fruit fly could be treated with gamma rays.

Leona Woods was a prolific author, publishing over 200 scientific papers.

Leona Woods died at St John's Medical Center in Santa Monica, California, on November 10,1986, from an anesthesia-induced stroke.

Leona Woods was survived by her sons Peter and John, and four grandchildren.

Leona Woods had two stepdaughters, Janet Eva and Susan Charlotte, from her second marriage.