Carolyn Beatrice Parker came from a family of doctors and academics, and she worked during World War II as a physicist on the Dayton Project, a critical part of the Manhattan Project tasked with producing polonium. (Polonium is a radioactive metal that was used in early nuclear weapons.)After the war, she continued her research and, a few years later, resumed her studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But she died of leukemia at age 48 before she was able to defend her Ph.D. dissertation. Decades later, during the height…
