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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Phyllis “PJ” Whitehouse

Chemist

Woman Scientist
Portrait of Phyllis Stockhausen taken for a newpaper feature. She is brunette and her hair is styled in a typical 1940s fashion.

Phyllis Whitehouse worked on the Manhattan Project as a chemist at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ.

In her Voices of the Manhattan Project interview, she describes how she was recruited at the University of Illinois, her memories of the laboratory, the experiments she conducted and what it was like to be a woman in a male-dominated field. She recounts what the people who worked there knew and thought about what they were doing, and how she felt about the repercussions. 

Photo courtesy of PJ’s son, Mark Whitehouse.
 

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