Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. She has been referred to as The First Lady of Physics, The Chinese Madame Curie, and the Queen of Nuclear Research.
健雄/Chien-Shiung Wu was born in 1912 in Liuhe Town, Taicang City, Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province, China. She obtained her Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technolodgy. She worked on the Manhattan Project in WWII. During the Manhattan Project, she worked at Columbia University, helping develop the process for separating uranium metal into U-235 and U-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. [1]
After the war, she became an associate research professor at Columbia. She later became the first woman to become a tenured physics professor in university history. She received the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames included the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research"
She passed away in 1997.
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