Chien-Shiung Wu

Despite the rarity of girls’ earning an education, Chien-Shiung Wu studied at her father's school in a town near Shanghai, and went on to study physics at the University of Shanghai. Elected by her peers as a student leader, Wu led protests such as the sit-in at the presidential palace in Nanjing. She graduated at the top of her class, and with the financial assistance of her uncle, enrolled at UC Berkeley to earn her Ph.D. Her time at Berkeley was riddled with discrimination and struggled obtaining scholarships as a result. 

Her status as a Chinese woman barred her from finding a research position at a university, so she became a professor at Princeton University and Smith College. Four years after earning her Ph.d., Wu was invited to contribute to the Manhattan project as a senior scientist at Columbia University. During her time at Columbia, she worked with uranium separation and radiation detection. 

Following the war, Columbia offered Wu another position to study the beta decay when the nucleus of an element transforms into another element. Her investigation led to the first confirmation of Enrico Fermi’s theory of beta decay. 

In 9156, she conducted the Wu Experiment, in which she helped Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang debunk the law of conservation of parity, which states that an isolated ensemble of particles’ parity remains the same and is conserved when they interact. Weak nuclear interactions, however, violate the law of parity. Wu’s experiment used radioactive cobalt to prove that identical particles are not always the same in action, disproving a principle that has been held for 30 years. Despite her significant contribution to this discovery, she was not acknowledged or accredited for her work. In 1957 Lee and Yang were awarded a Nobel Prize in physics, but Wu would go uncredited for another 23 years. 

In 1965, Wu published Beta Decay, which is today considered a standard reading for nuclear physicists. In 1975, Wu became the first elected women president of the American Physical Society and the chairman of the physics department at Columbia adjusted her pay to match that of her male colleagues. 

Chien-Shiung Wu, despite being faced with discouragement due to her race and gender, persevered through her love and passion for physics, and as result, made ground-breaking contributions to science.