Approximately 300 miles away from Wilkins’ and Reed’s work at the Met Lab, a research physicist named Carolyn B. Parker was busy at work on the Dayton Project, conducting Manhattan Project work focused on the radioactive element polonium. Parker earned her bachelor’s from Fisk University in 1938, where she later became an assistant professor in physics. After her undergraduate studies, she went on to earn a master’s in mathematics from University of Michigan in 1941, prior to joining the Dayton Project in Ohio. Parker was only in her twenties when she was recruited for her superb mathematical and scientific skills to work as a research physicist. In 1943, Parker’s team was tasked with separating and purifying polonium, the element that was used as the initiator for the fission chain reaction in the atomic bomb and early atomic weapons. The work of Parker’s team contributed to the development of the initiator used in the Trinity Test in New Mexico in July 1945, and in the Fat Man device that was dropped on Nagasaki later in 1945.
Parker’s research on polonium would continue after the end of World War II at the AEC Mound Laboratory, established to consolidate and to continue the polonium-related work being done at the Dayton Project locations. Parker continued her work as a research physicist for aircraft research and construction at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, before taking a position as a professor at her old undergraduate school, Fisk University.
In 1951, she entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics graduate program where she earned a second master’s degree in 1953. She is considered the first African American woman known to earn a postgraduate degree in physics, as well as the first African American to earn a postgraduate degree in physics at MIT. During her Ph.D. studies she was employed by the Air Force Cambridge Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a leading research laboratory.
Despite finishing the coursework for her Ph.D. in physics, leukemia prevented Parker from completing her doctoral program. In 2008, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health determined that leukemia was an occupational risk of working with polonium, the likely cause of Parker’s illness. She passed away at the age of 48 on March 3, 1966.
Without the groundbreaking contributions of Wilkins and Reed at the Met Lab, and Parker with the Dayton Project, the Manhattan Project would not have achieved success in the timeframe necessary to secure the end of World War II. Without the continued scientific achievements of these individuals, modern nuclear science, space exploration, and aviation would not look the same. This Black History Month, LM honors and celebrates the lives of these extraordinary contributors to the Manhattan Project and beyond.