Arthur Compton

Arthur Compton was an American physicist who directed the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where a team led by Enrico Fermi built Chicago Pile-1 and achieved the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. Already a Nobel laureate for his 1923 discovery of the Compton effect, the change in wavelength of X-rays scattered by electrons, Compton was recruited to oversee the plutonium-production research that grew into the Manhattan Project's Hanford site. He later served as chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis after the war.