Chain Reaction

Chien-Shiung Wu was an award-winning physicist and the only Chinese person to work on the Manhattan Project. Born in 1912 in a small town near Shanghai, China, Wu’s parents believed in education for girls, despite it being an uncommon belief at that time. She went on to study physics at a university in Shanghai, where one of her professors had worked with Marie Curie! After graduation, Wu moved to San Francisco and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her first job was as a physics instructor at Princeton University, and she joined the Manhattan Project in 1944 where her work focused on radiation detectors. After the war, Wu made significant contributions to the study of beta decay, and her experiments on the subject helped two other scientists win the Nobel Prize in 1957. Her research helped answer important biological questions about blood and sickle cell anemia and she won the National Medal of Science, the Comstock Prize, and the Wolf Prize in Physics. Wu served as the first female president of the American Physical Society and her book on beta decay is still a standard reference for nuclear physicists today.
• Source: https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/chien-shiung-wu
• Image Source: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/medalofscience50/wu.jsp