Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American experimental physicist whose consummate precision earned her epithets such as 'the First Lady of Physics', 'the Chinese Marie Curie', and 'the Queen of Nuclear Research'. After studying at National Central University in Nanjing, she immigrated to the United States in 1936 to earn her doctorate at UC Berkeley under Ernest Lawrence. Recruited to the Manhattan Project at Columbia University, she made crucial contributions to gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment and solved the mystery of xenon poisoning in nuclear reactors.

In 1956, theoretical physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang proposed that parity might not be conserved in weak nuclear interactions and turned to Wu to test the hypothesis. Designing an ingenious experiment cooling cobalt-60 nuclei to near absolute zero inside a cryogenic solenoid, Wu proved conclusively that beta decay emitted electrons preferentially in a specific direction, violating parity conservation. While Lee and Yang received the 1957 Nobel Prize, Wu was unjustly excluded, though she later became the first female president of the American Physical Society and won the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics.