Chien-Shiung Wu, 1912-1997

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Liuhe, China. Her parents supported her curiosity and interests and believed in equal education for all their children, regardless of gender. She first studied at Ming De School, a girls’ school her father had founded, and at 10, she went to a women’s boarding school that included a teacher training program. This school’s curriculum allowed her to cultivate her growing passion for science.

At the time, government regulations ruled that teacher-training college students must serve as schoolteachers for one year before continuing to academic studies. So, she taught at a public school in Shanghai, administrated by the famous philosopher Hu Shih, who became her mentor and father figure. During her free time, she taught herself mathematics, and in 1930, she enrolled at the National Central University in Nanjing, studying mathematics and later switching to physics.

After graduating, she worked as an assistant at Zhejiang University and as a researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica. In 1936, at 24, she was accepted to the University of Michigan and moved to the US. Upon her arrival, she discovered that the institute was highly discriminating against women, denying them access via the front entrance. Wu decided to study at a more liberal university and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley.

An exceptional student, she was chosen by the famous Italian physicist Emilio Segrè to work with him in his beta decay studies that later significantly contributed to the development of nuclear bombs. In 1940, Wu completed her Ph.D. and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa but didn’t get a faculty position. She remained at Berkeley as a post-doctoral fellow at the Radiation Laboratory for two years.

In 1942, at 30, she married fellow physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan. The couple moved to the East Coast, where she worked as an assistant professor and later associate professor at Smith College. In 1944, she accepted a position at Princeton University, becoming the first female faculty member of its Physics Department.

That same year, she joined the research team of the Manhattan Project, which worked on the atomic bomb development. Based on her Ph.D. dissertation, Wu helped to determine the separation process of uranium into U-235 and U-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion and by that to improve the Geiger counters for the detection of radiation and the enrichment of uranium in large quantities.

After WW2, Wu remained at Columbia University, becoming the first woman to serve as a tenured physics professor at Columbia.

In 1956, physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang asked her to conduct an experiment proving that the conservation of parity did not apply during beta decay. Though referred to as the “Wu experiment,” she didn’t receive any recognition when Chen and Yang received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for this theory.

In the next three decades until her retirement in 1981, she worked on many theories that often crossed over to other scientific fields, including research on the molecular changes in red blood cells that cause sickle-cell anemia, research on magnetism, and Bell’s theorem, in which she confirmed the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

In 1975, at 63, she became the first woman to serve as president of the American Physical Society and the first woman to be awarded the National Medal of Science in Physics.

In her later years, Wu renewed her activism and became an advocate for various fights and causes. She protested against the imprisonment of the in-laws of physicist Kerson Huang and the journalist Lei Chen in Taiwan, which with her help, was eventually released. She spoke against gender discrimination, especially in the academic world, and promoted teaching STEM subjects to all students, regardless of gender, race, or background.

She died following a stroke at the age of 85. Per her wish, her ashes were buried in the courtyard of the Ming De School.