Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu emigrated from China in 1936 after her college adviser encouraged her to pursue a doctorate in the United States; she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940. After several academic appointments—on the East Coast, as anti-Asian prejudice in California hindered her personal and professional life—she joined the Manhattan Project in 1944 to work on uranium enrichment for the atomic bomb. Wu did her major theoretical work after World War II at Columbia University on the behavior of subatomic particles. Two of her male colleagues who were working on this project received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1957; it has been posited that Wu was not included in the prize because of gender bias. Wu did win most of the other major prizes for her work, and although she disliked being called “The First Lady of Physics,” she was a trailblazer for women in the sciences.