Marguerite Moilliet was born on November 6, 1915, in Minatitlán, Veracruz, and raised in Texas. She did both her undergraduate and graduate studies at Rice University, and taught for two years at the University of Houston before joining the Naval Air Warfare Center, Indianapolis in 1943, becoming head of optics research there. After the end of World War II, she was briefly a researcher at the University of North Carolina before becoming a weapons researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and later the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. In 1953 she moved to South Carolina, to become professor of physics and head of the science division at Columbia College; she returned to China Lake in 1957. In 1966 she became head of the Weapons Systems Analysis Division there, and from 1977 to 1978 she was acting head of the laboratory. She died on March 14, 1989, in Ridgecrest, California.
