Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in China in 1912 and died in 1997. Wu was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who contributed to the fields of nuclear and particle physics. She worked on the Manhattan Project and helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238. Wu won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. She was nicknamed the “First Lady of Physics”, the “Chinese Madame Curie” and the “Queen of Nuclear Research.”

When she was growing up, she would listen to the radio rather than play outside like the other children. Before she learned to read, she would listen to her father read from scientific journals. When she was 10, she went to a boarding school that introduced science subjects. She competed for teacher training which did not charge for room and board or tuition and guaranteed a job after graduation. She ranked ninth out of 10,000 applicants. She went to the National Central University after graduating. She ended up teaching in a public school in Shanghai.

Wu felt that her background and training did not sufficiently prepare her for majoring in science so she began a habit of self-study. Her father encouraged her and bought her books which gave her confidence to major in mathematics. She first majored in math at the National Central University but then transferred to physics. After she graduated, she did graduate-level studies in physics and worked at Zhejiang University. Later she became a researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica. Her supervisor encouraged her to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. So, she left for the United States in 1936 and she never saw her parents again.

Wu ended up going to the University of California, Berkley after finding out how sexist the University of Michigan was. She met physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan there who introduced her to the head of the physics department. He offered Wu a place in the graduate school even though the year had already begun. She applied for a scholarship at the end of the year but was offered a readership with a lower stiped. Yuan got a scholarship at Caltech. Wu presented her thesis in 1940 and was her first work with beta decay. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the US academic honor society.

She couldn’t get a faculty position at a university so she stayed at the Radiation Lab as a post-doctoral fellow. She hope to go back to China and help rebuild it but then World War II began.

Wu and Yuan were married in 1942 but none of their families were there. They moved to the east coast where Wu worked as an assistant professor at Smith College and Yuan worked on radar for RCA. Wu was frustrated at her job because she had no opportunities for research so she accepted a job at Princeton University. She was the first female faculty member in the physics department where she taught officers of the navy.

In 1944, Wu joined the Manhattan Project’s Substitute Alloy Materials Laboratories at Columbia University. Later, she had a bigger role in the project but she rarely ever opened up about her involvement in building the bomb.

After WWII, communication with China was restored but they were in the middle of a civil war. She would not go back to China for years. She had a son in 1947 who also grew up to be a physicist like his parents. After the communists came to power, her father urged her not to return to China. She became a US citizen in 1954. Her older brother died in 1958, her father in 1959, and her mother in 1962 but she was not permitted to attend their funerals. Eventually, she visited China and Taiwan several times after 1973.

She suffered a stroke and died in 1997. Her ashes were buried in the courtyard of the Ming De School that was founded by her father.