The Manhattan Project VIPs were two prominent scientists, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. Fermi was an Italian-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 for his work on induced radioactivity. He was a key figure in the development of the first nuclear reactor. Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American physicist who is known as the 'father of the hydrogen bomb'. He was also a major contributor to the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs during World War II.