Portal:Oregon/Selected biography/52

Raemer Edgar Schreiber (November 11, 1910 – December 24, 1998) was an American physicist from McMinnville in the U.S. state of Oregon. He grew up in McMinnville where he attended high school before enrolling at Linfield College, also in McMinnville. Schreiber graduated from Linfield and then earned a masters degree at the University of Oregon before becoming a graduate assistant at then Oregon State College (now Oregon State University). Schreiber then earned a doctorate at Purdue University in 1941 before joining the Manhattan Project. He saw the first atomic bomb detonated in the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and prepared the Fat Man bomb that was used in the bombing of Nagasaki. After the war, he served at Los Alamos as a group leader, and was involved in the design of the hydrogen bomb. In 1955, he became the head of its Nuclear Rocket Propulsion (N) Division, which developed the first nuclear-powered rockets. He served as deputy director of the laboratory from 1972 until his retirement in 1974.