Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu (1912 to 1997) was a Chinese-American experimental physicist who made major contributions to nuclear and particle physics. Born in Liuhe, in Jiangsu province, she worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 by gaseous diffusion, the enrichment step that supplied fissile material. She is best known for the Wu experiment, which showed that parity is not conserved in weak interactions, a result that brought her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. Wu herself received the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her command of experimental technique drew comparisons to Marie Curie, and she was called the First Lady of Physics.