Phyllis “PJ” Whitehouse

Chemist

Woman Scientist

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.

Related Profiles

Ida Noddack

Germany

Ida Noddack, née Tacke, was born in Wesel, Lackhausen in 1896. She earned her doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin in 1921, and became the first woman to hold a professional chemist’s position in the German chemical industry.

Mary Lou Curtis

Dayton, OH

Mary Lou Curtis joined the Manhattan Project in Dayton, Ohio in 1943. Mrs. Curtis worked in the Counting Room at Monsanto’s Unit III facility, where she developed new methods to measure and analyze radioactive materials, such as polonium, which was used as the trigger for the atomic bombs.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Columbia University

Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972) was a German-born American theoretical physicist and 1963 Nobel Prize winner.

Norma Gross

Los Alamos, NM

Norma Gross was an American chemist. She was married to an Army lieutenant who was stationed at Los Alamos during the Second World War.