Kathryn Grove Shipp

Kathryn Elmira Grove was born in Annandale, Pennsylvania.[1] She and her sister Ruth were raised in the household of an uncle and aunt, William Smith Conner[2] and Carolyn W. Conner,[3] in Madera, California, after their parents died. She graduated from Madera High School in 1921 and from Mills College in 1925, where she studied under Aurelia Henry Reinhardt.[4] She completed her doctorate in organic chemistry at Yale University in 1930,[5][6] with a postdoctoral year of further studies at Oxford on a National Research Council fellowship.[7] While at Yale, she was the first woman graduate student to hold the Dupont Fellowship in Chemistry.[8]

Shipp was an assistant instructor in chemistry at Vassar College in 1925.[4] She left paid employment for 26 years to raise her children, before returning to laboratory chemistry in 1957,[9] when she joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in White Oak, Maryland.[6][1] In 1964, she developed hexanitrostilbene (HNS), a vacuum-tolerant, heat-insensitive explosive used for seismic experiments on the moon, during the Apollo program.[5][1] "Here I am, a horse and buggy chemist, working in a nuclear age," she commented on her career in 1967.[6] She retired from the Naval Research Laboratory in 1970.[1]

Shipp received the Navy's Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1962.[1] In 1967, she was one of the six recipients of the Federal Woman's Award,[10][11] presented by President Lyndon B. Johnson.[12] That same year, Mills College presented Shipp with an honorary Doctor of Law degree.[13][14]

Shipp held at least six patents,[15] on chemicals or processes of preparing chemicals, including "Preparation of 2, 4, 6-trinitrobenzyl halides" (1966),[16] hexanitrostilbene (1970)[17] and polynitrobenzophenone (1971, with her colleague Lloyd A. Kaplan).[18]

Kathryn Grove married fellow chemist Joseph Harrel Shipp in 1932.[19] They had four children together before they divorced.[6] She died from a heart attack on October 14, 1977, aged 73 years, in Tiburon, California.[20]