World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseGladys Amelia Anslow was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States in 1892. She attended Springfield Central High School, and then Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts between 1909 and 1914. In 1916 she began her graduate studies under Janet T. Howell using a new Rowland grating spectrograph acquired by Smith College to research the emission spectra of radium, resulting in her thesis "Spectroscopic Evidence for the Electron Theory of Matter". In 1917, upon receiving her degree, she replaced Howell as the instructor in physics. Moving on to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, she received a doctorate degree there in 1924. In the 1930s, she became the first woman to work on the 8 MeV cyclotron at University of California, Berkeley. During WW2, she was one of the few women involved with the Manhattan Project; for her contributions to the Manhattan Project, she was awarded the President's Certificate of Merit by Harry Truman. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955. She passed away in 1969.

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