Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu
In Shanghai, China, on May 31, 1912, trailblazing physicist Chien-Shiung Wu was born. She was a middle child with one older and one younger brother and her father, Zhong-Yi Wu, was both an engineer and intellectual. Despite it being uncommon for a girl to go to school at the time, she studied at Mindge Women’s Vocational Continuing School, founded by her father who believed that girls should receive an education. Graduating at the top of her class in 1929, she went on to receive a physics degree from Nanjing University in 1934.
Following her graduation, she worked at a physics lab in China, where she was mentored by Dr. Jing-Wei Gu, another female physicist. Dr. Gu encouraged Wu to pursue an education in the US. In 1936, she traveled to California and studied nuclear physics at UC Berkeley, advised by leading physicist Ernest Lawrence. She graduated in 1940 and married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan in 1942, whom she had met during her time at Berkeley. After the wedding, they moved to the East Coast, where she found a teaching job at Smith College and Princeton University. Notably,she was the first woman to ever be hired in the physics department at Princeton. In 1944, Wu was hired at Columbia University, where she began to work on the famed Manhattan Project.
The Manhattan Project, established at the height of World War II, focused on producing the world’s first atomic weapons. As one of the country’s leading scientists, Wu contributed significantly by improving Geiger counters used to detect radiation. Additionally, her efforts assisted in determining the process for splitting Uranium into U-235 and U-238 isotopes using gaseous diffusion.
After the birth of her son Vincent Yuan in 1947, Wu continued her beta decay research at Columbia ,although she would not receive a pay equal to that of her male colleagues until 1975. Another case of gender discrimination occurred in 1956, when colleagues Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang approached her seeking guidance in beta decay. Wu was asked to prove their hypothesis that there was no evidence of the law of conservation of parity during beta decay. Her experiments used radioactive cobalt at near-zero temperatures, proving Lee and Ning’s theory correct. In 1957, the two men received Nobel Prizes for their “discoveries,” while Wu received no recognition. However, her future discoveries and contributions would earn her fifteen awards in total.
In 1981, she retired from Columbia. After her death in 1997, her ashes were buried in Mingde School in China, the same school her father had started when she was a little girl. Wu’s legacy lives on — today, she is known as the “greatest female Chinese scientist in the twentieth century.”
