Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu
"I wonder whether the tiny atoms and nuclei, or the mathematical symbols, or the DNA molecules have any preference for either masculine or feminine treatment."
Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu
Dates
- 1912 - Born in Taicang, Jiangsu, China
- 1923 - Left Taicang to attend boarding school for teacher training
- 1929 - Admitted to National Central University in Nanjing
- 1934 - Began graduate-level physics studies at Zhejiang University
- 1936 - Left China to complete her studies in the United States, leaving behind her parents (who she would not see again)
- 1940 - Completed her PhD and began post-doctoral work
- 1942 - Married fellow physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan and moved to the eastern United States to teach
- 1944 - Joined the Manhattan Project at Columbia University while teaching at Princeton
- 1945 - Accepted a position at Columbia, where she would remain for the rest of her career
- 1949 - Joined the staff of the Brookhaven National Laboratory
- 1954 - Naturalized as a United States citizen after the end of the Chinese Civil War
- 1956 - Conducted the "Wu experiment" to demonstrate the nonconservation of parity. The results of this experiment would win her collaborators a Nobel Prize in 1957, and her the Wolf Prize in 1978. This experiment provided a way to define left and right without reference to the physical body of a person (just think about that...)
- 1958 - Became a full professor at Columbia. Awarded the first honorary doctorate from Princeton to be given to a woman
- 1960s - Performed a series of further experiments on beta decay and magnetism
- 1966 - Literally wrote the book on Beta Decay
- 1973 - Returned to mainland China for the first time since 1936
- 1978 - Awarded the first Wolf Prize in Physics
- 1981 - Retired from Columbia University
- 1997 - Died in New York City
More Reading
For more information on Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, you can start by visiting her Wikipedia page, or her page on the National Parks Service site.