Leona Woods

She died at St. John's Medical Center in Santa Monica, California, on November 10, 1986, from an anesthesia-induced stroke. She was survived by her sons Peter and John, and four grandchildren. She also had two stepdaughters, Janet Eva Libby and Susan Charlotte Libby from her second marriage.

Three years later, she became a professor at the University of Colorado, researching high-energy physics, astrophysics and cosmology. She then became a staff member at RAND Corporation, where she worked until 1976. In 1966, she divorced John Marshall, and married Willard Libby, who had won the Nobel prize in 1960. She later joined him at UCLA, where she became a visiting professor of environmental studies, engineering, engineering archaeology, mechanical aerospace and nuclear engineering in 1973.

She was a prolific author, publishing over 200 scientific papers. While at RAND she wrote a paper on Creation of an Atmosphere for the Moon (1969). Her works include the autobiographical .mw-parser-output .vanchor>:target~.vanchor-text{background-color:#b1d2ff}The Uranium People (1979), a history of early atomic research. After Libby died in 1980, she edited his papers with Rainer Berger, and published The Life Work of Nobel Laureate Willard Libby (1982). Her last paper, on quasi-stellar objects, appeared in 1984.

After the war, she became a fellow at Fermi's Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago. She later worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and New York University, where she became a professor in 1962. Her research involved high-energy physics, astrophysics and cosmology. In 1966 she divorced John Marshall and married Nobel laureate Willard Libby. She became a professor at the University of Colorado, and a staff member at RAND Corporation. In later life she became interested in ecological and environmental issues, and she devised a method of using the isotope ratios in tree rings to study climate change. She was a strong advocate of food irradiation as a means of killing harmful bacteria.

After Fermi died in 1954, the Marshalls separated. John Marshall returned to the Los Alamos Laboratory, while Leona, now effectively a single mother, became a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 1957. The following year she became a fellow at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, at a time when the focus of research in physics was shifting away from the nucleus and towards elementary particles. In 1960, she joined New York University as an associate professor of physics. She became a professor in 1962.

After the war, Leona Marshall returned to the University of Chicago, where she became a fellow at Fermi's Institute for Nuclear Studies. Working with the Chicago Pile 3 heavy-water reactor, she found a way to 100 percent spin polarize neutron beams, and determined the refractive index of neutrons for various materials. Her second child, John Marshall III, was born in 1949. She became an assistant professor in 1953.

Mulliken allowed her to choose her own research problem, and edited the final version before it appeared in the Physical Review. Her doctoral thesis, "On the Silicon Oxide Bands", prepared under the supervision of Mulliken and Polish chemist Stanisław Mrozowski was accepted in 1943. Mulliken, she later recalled, had twice told her "that perhaps not all he taught me was wasted." His students, she noted, "agree that this is his highest praise."

Woods married John Marshall in July 1943. Soon after, she fell pregnant. While she told Enrico Fermi, they agreed not to let Walter Zinn know, for fear that he would insist that she leave the reactor building. She covered up her pregnant belly with her baggy denim work clothes. She rode to work each day on an unheated Army bus, "arriving each morning barely in time to vomit before starting the day's work." The child, a boy called Peter, was born in 1944. She returned to work a few days later.

By 1942, when she was finishing writing up her thesis, she was the youngest and last of Mulliken's pre-war students, and was working alone because all her fellow students had become involved with war work. She met Herbert Anderson, who was working for Enrico Fermi. The two would go swimming together in Lake Michigan every afternoon at 5 pm. Anderson discovered that Woods was adept with vacuum technology from her research, and as soon as her PhD was finished, he hired her to work with the boron trifluoride detectors used to measure neutron flux.

After passing her qualifying exams in chemistry, she approached the Nobel Prize for Physics laureate James Franck about being his graduate student, having been impressed by a talk he gave in 1939 on Brillouin zones. Franck accepted, but told her that when he was young his professor had warned him that as a Jewish academic, he would starve to death. Franck therefore warned Woods that "You are a woman and you will starve to death." Despite the fact that Franck did not look malnourished, she took the warning seriously, and decided to instead become a graduate student of Robert Mulliken, who would one day become a Nobel laureate himself.

Leona Harriet Woods (August 9, 1919 – November 10, 1986), later known as Leona Woods Marshall and Leona Woods Marshall Libby, was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb.

Leona Harriet Woods was born on a farm in La Grange, Illinois on August 9, 1919, the second of five children of Weightstill Arno Woods, a lawyer, and his wife Mary Leona Holderness Woods. She had two sisters and two brothers. She graduated from Lyons Township High School in La Grange at 14, and received her BS in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1938, at the age of 18.