Nuclear Museum Logo
Nuclear Museum Logo

National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Jennet Conant is a bestselling American author and journalist. She is the granddaughter of Manhattan Project administrator James B. Conant and has written extensively on the Manhattan Project and some of its most prominent figures.

Conant was born in Seoul, South Korea. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a B.A. in Political Theory, and double-majored in Philosophy at Haverford College. She received a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Conant worked at Newsweek for seven years and has also written for GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair and the New York Times.

She is the author of five books on World War II: Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II (2002); 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos (2005); The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (2008); A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS (2011); and Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist (2017).

Conant is a member of AHF’s Advisory Committee.

Related Profiles

Bruce Cameron Reed

Bruce Cameron Reed is a physicist and a professor at Alma College. Reed completed his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Waterloo in Canada in 1984.

Arthur Squires

Manhattan, NY

Dr. Arthur Squires was born in Kansas and received a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry from the University of Missouri.

Angela Creager

Princeton, NJ

Currently the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University. She is also the director of the Shelby Collum Davis Center for Historical Studies and previously was the president of the History of Science Society from 2014 to 2015.

Edgar Sengier

Manhattan, NY

Edgar Sengier (1879 – 1963) was the director of Union Miniere du Haut Katanga. After being warned by British scientists regarding the potential danger were the uranium ore to fall into the wrong hands, Sengier decided to transport half the uranium stockpile from the Congo to the United States in 1940.