Singleton, Mary F.

Mary Singleton was born in 1936 in Fort Lewis, Washington. She received her B.S. (1958) in Chemistry from Wheaton College (Wheaton, Illinois), graduating summa cum laude. She received her M.S. (1960) in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1960-1962 she worked with Melvin Calvin, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1961, at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1962 she left Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and for the next twelve years she raised her children and moved to Europe, Wisconsin, and California as her husband's job required.

Singleton began working again in 1974 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, where she worked for twenty-two years. Most of her career was in research, including tritium-getter materials, oil shale processing, and growth of nonlinear optical crystals for the LLNL laser project. When she retired at the end of 1996, she was deputy plutonium facility manager. Soon after retirement, she enrolled as a student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Division of the History of Science and Technology and attended Oxford University during the summer of 2000. Her studies focused on the history of women in science, including the Manhattan Project and Dorothy Hodgkin's students.

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