Lost Women of the Manhattan Project: Carolyn Beatrice Parker

Lost Women of Science

Carolyn Beatrice Parker came from a family of doctors and academics and worked during World War II as a physicist on the Dayton Project, a critical part of the Manhattan Project tasked with producing polonium. (Polonium is a radioactive metal that was used in the production of early nuclear weapons.) After the war, Parker continued her research and her studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but she died of leukemia at age 48 before she was able to defend her PhD thesis. Decades later, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, citizens in her hometown of Gainesville, Florida voted to rename an elementary school in her honor. November 18th would have been her 107th birthday.