Portal:Nuclear technology/Biographies/21
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Priscilla Duffield (April 8, 1918 – July 21, 2009, née Greene) worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. She was secretary to Ernest O. Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory, and to J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Los Alamos Laboratory. After the war she was executive assistant to directors of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the National Accelerator Laboratory.
A graduate of the University of California, from which she obtained a degree in political science, Priscilla Greene started working for Lawrence in February 1942, and then for Oppenheimer later that year. She arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in March 1943, and established the Los Alamos Laboratory's office. She became the office manager at Los Alamos, greeting visitors, answering the telephone, making travel arrangements, arranging security passes and accommodation, and taking notes of telephone calls. In September 1943, she married Robert B. Duffield, a chemist working at the Los Alamos laboratory, and changed her surname from Greene to Duffield.
In the post-war years, Duffield was secretary and executive assistant to Roger Revelle, the director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In November 1967, she became secretary and executive assistant to Robert R. Wilson, the founding director of the National Accelerator Laboratory, and once again she helped establish a new scientific laboratory on a new site. In later life she moved to Colorado, where she served on the board of the Uncompahgre Medical Clinic. (Full article...)