Chien Shiung Wu was born in the Liuhe, Jiangsu province of China on May 29, 1912. She grew up in Taicang, China where her father was an advocate for girl’s education and founded a women’s school in China. In 1936, she graduated from the National Central University in Nanking China. After graduating she went to study physics at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1940, she received her Ph.D. and taught at both Smith College and Princeton University. In 1944, she was recruited by the U.S. government to work on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University. During this time, Chien helped developed a process of enriching uranium to be used as fuel. In 1956, Chien devised an experiment that helped disprove the Parity Law (a law of physics). This experiment is still thought to be one of the most important developments in atomic and nuclear physics. Despite her research and experiments, Chien was not awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. The honor went to her male colleagues instead.
“There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that is not going to the lab at all”
After the war, she continued to work at Columbia where she became the Dupin professor of 
physics in 1957. Chien continued to do research in atomic and nuclear physics, and the structure of hemoglobin. In 1975, Chien was awarded the National Medal of Science and became the first female president of the American Physical Society. Chien was also the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Princeton and she was the first woman to receive National Academy of Sciences Comstock Prize. She retired from teaching at Columbia in 1981. Chien is not only known for her work but she was also an advocate for women in science. Chien died on February 16, 1997 in New York.
Carolyn Walence