Priscilla Duffield (April 8, 1918 – July 21, 2009, née Greene) worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II.

A graduate of the University of California, from which she obtained a degree in political science, Priscilla Greene started working for Lawrence in February 1942, and then for Oppenheimer later that year.

After graduation, she studied and travelled in New York and Europe before returning to Berkeley, where she got a job as secretary to Ernest O. Lawrence, the director of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California,[2] in February 1942,[3] replacing Helen Griggs, who had left to marry Glenn Seaborg.

[4] She immediately started working for Oppenheimer full-time, taking over the disused office of a physics professor who was absent on leave in November 1942.

She would listen in on all of Oppenheimer's calls and take notes, except when the director of the Manhattan Project, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., told her to get off the line.

[9] Greene married Robert B. Duffield, a chemist working on the project, in a ceremony at Dorothy McKibbin's house on September 5, 1943.

On November 6, 1967, she became secretary and executive assistant to Robert R. Wilson, the founding director of the National Accelerator Laboratory, and served in that capacity until December 31, 1972.

Duffield said that moving to the Weston site evoked memories of the esprit de corps at Los Alamos, and "that did really make it a frontier."

"We had a flagpole and a big fancy colorful tent was put alongside the house" As she explained, "It was a place to sit and have a meeting: but it also "was a symbol."

Later, secretary Barb (Rozic) Kristen recalled that many new employees considered it hard to know just what to do in those early days, but Duffield, unlike everyone else, knew exactly what was needed and how to get things done.