Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu was a -born physicist with an expertise in radioactivity. She worked on the Manhattan Project and disproved the conservation of . Her nicknames included the “First Lady of Physics”, “ of China,” and “Madame Wu.” She died after her second stroke on February 16, 1997.

China

Although her is Taicang , she was born in 1912, in Shanghai, but was raised in Liuhe, a city about 30 miles from Shanghai. Her father, Wu Zhongyi , was a proponent of gender equality and founded Mingde Women's Vocational Continuing School. She left her hometown at the age of eleven to go to the Suzhou Women's Normal School No. 2. Her mother was Fan Fuhua .

She was admitted to the National Central University in Nanjing in 1929. According to the government regulations of the time, normal school students entering universities needed to serve as teachers for one year, so in 1929 she went to teach in the Public School of China founded by Hu Shi in Shanghai. From 1930 to 1934, she studied in the Physics Department of National Central University . For two years after her graduation, she did postgraduate study and worked as an assistant at Zhejiang University

America

In 1936, she went to the with a female friend, Dong Ruofen , a chemist from . Wu studied at the University of California, Berkeley under and received her Ph.D in 1940.

She married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, also a physicist, two years later. They had a son, Vincent , who became a physicist as well. The family moved to the , where Wu taught at Smith College, Princeton University, and Columbia University .

At Columbia she contributed to the Manhattan Project by developing a process to separate uranium isotopes by gaseous diffusion and by developing improved Geiger counters. She assisted Tsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development by providing him with a possible test method for beta decay in 1956 that worked successfully. Some consider this very instrumental in the creation of the laws, but she did not share their Nobel Prize – a fact widely blamed on sexism by the selection committee.

Her book ''Beta Decay'' is still a standard reference for nuclear physicists.

She later conducted research into the molecular changes in the deformation of hemoglobins that cause sickle-cell disease.

Wu set precedents for womankind on several occasions. She was:
the first female instructor in the Physics Department of Princeton University;
the first woman with a Princeton honorary doctorate;
the first female President of the American Physical Society .

Honors

Wu won numerous honors and recognitions:
*Member of the
*Research Corporation Award 1958
*Achievement Award, American Association of University Women 1960
*Comstock Award, National Academy of Sciences 1964
*Chi-Tsin Achievement Award, Chi-Tsin Culture Foundation, Taiwan 1965
*Scientist of the Year Award, Industrial Research Magazine 1974
*Tom W. Bonner Prize, American Physical Society 1975
*National Medal of Science 1975
*Wolf Prize in Physics, Israel 1978
*Honorary Fellow Royal Society of Edinburgh
*Fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences
*Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science
*Fellow American Physical Society

At the time of her death, Wu was Professor Emerita of Physics at Columbia.