He was a member of the Columbia University team which was the first in the United States to verify the European discovery of the nuclear fission of uranium via neutron bombardment.
Glasoe, Dana P. Mitchell, and Hugh Paxton, junior members of the physics faculty at Columbia, worked on the cyclotron part-time.
At the suggestion of Mitchell, Dunning offered Herbert L. Anderson a teaching assistant position if he would also help with the design and building of the cyclotron during work on his doctorate in physics, which he did.
The cyclotron would in a few years be used by Dunning, Glasoe, and Anderson in a historic experiment based on the discovery of nuclear fission in Europe in December 1938 and January 1939.
[6][7][8] In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons;[9] simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner.
[12][13][14] Even before it was published, Meitner's and Frisch's interpretation of the work of Hahn and Strassmann crossed the Atlantic Ocean with Niels Bohr, who was to lecture at Princeton University.
[17] During World War II, Glasoe was a staff member and associate group leader at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.