page_title: Chien-Shiung Wu
section_title: Berkeley
hierarchical_section_title: Chien-Shiung Wu / Career / Berkeley
caption_attribution_description: Subject: Wu, C. S (Chien-shiung) 1912-1997 &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Columbia University Type: Black-and-white photographs Date: 1958 &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;3/15/1958 Topic: Physics &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Women scientists Local number: SIA Acc. 90-105 [SIA2010-1512] Summary: Chien-shiung Wu (1912-1997), professor of physics at Columbia University, with &quot;Dr. Brode&quot; (probably Wallace Brode) Cite as: Acc. 90-105 - Science Service, Records, 1920s-1970s, Smithsonian Institution Archivess Persistent URL:Link to data base record Repository:Smithsonian Institution Archives View more collections from the Smithsonian Institution.
context_page_description: Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the field of nuclear physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research".
context_section_description: The two women arrived in San Francisco, where Wu's plans for graduate study changed after visiting the University of California, Berkeley. She met physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, a grandson of Yuan Shikai (the first President of the Republic of China and self-proclaimed Emperor of China). Yuan showed her the Radiation Laboratory, where  the director was Ernest O. Lawrence, who would soon win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron particle accelerator.
  Wu heard that at Michigan women were not even allowed to use the front entrance, and decided that she would prefer to study at Berkeley. Yuan took her to see Raymond T. Birge, the head of the physics department, and he offered Wu a place in the graduate school despite the fact that the academic year had already commenced. Wu then abandoned her plans to study at Michigan and enrolled at Berkeley. Her Berkeley classmates included Robert R. Wilson and George Volkoff; her friends included Ursula Schaefer, a history student who chose to remain in the United States rather than return to Nazi Germany, and Margaret Lewis, an American post-doctoral student. Wu applied for a scholarship at the end of her first year, but there was prejudice against Asian students, and Wu and Yuan were instead offered a readership with a lower stipend. Yuan then applied for, and secured, a scholarship at Caltech.
  Wu made rapid progress in her education and her research. Although Lawrence was officially her supervisor, she also worked closely with Emilio Segrè. Her thesis had two separate parts. The first was on bremsstrahlung, the electromagnetic radiation produced by the deceleration of a charged particle when deflected by another charged particle, typically an electron by an atomic nucleus. She investigated this using beta-emitting phosphorus-32, a radioactive isotope easily produced in the cyclotron that Lawrence and his brother John H. Lawrence were evaluating for use in cancer treatment and as a radioactive tracer. This marked Wu's first work with beta decay, a subject on which she would become an authority. The second part of the thesis was about the production of radioactive isotopes of xenon produced by the nuclear fission of uranium with the 37-inch and 60-inch cyclotrons at the Radiation Laboratory.
  Wu completed her PhD in June 1940, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the US academic honor society. In spite of Lawrence and Segrè's recommendations, she could not secure a faculty position at a university, so she remained at the Radiation Laboratory as a post-doctoral fellow.
caption: Chien-Shiung Wu (left) with Wallace Brode (right) at Columbia University in 1958.
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