INFO Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu

Wu was awarded the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her contributions in experimental physics were so important that she was compared to the physicist and chemist Marie Curie, and was dubbed "The First Lady of Physics", "the Chinese Marie Curie" or "the queen of nuclear research".

Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-born American physicist who was an expert in radioactivity. She worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium metal into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion.

She studied physics at the University of Nanjing, after participating in mobilizations so that women could enter higher education.

She was born on May 31, 1912, in Taicheng (China). And she died on February 16, 1997, in New York (United States) died of a stroke.

In March 1944, Wu joined the Manhattan Project at the Substitute Carbon Materials (SAM) Laboratories at Columbia University. Wu worked with physicist James Rainwater in a group led by William W. Havens, Jr. whose task was to develop radiation detector instrumentation.

After the end of the war in August 1945, Wu was offered a position as a research associate professor at Columbia.

Wun married physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan

Wu received a letter from his family, but plans to visit China were interrupted by the Chinese Civil War, and the 1947 birth of a son, Vincent Yuan, who grew up to become a physicist like his parents.

ESO 2A Lucía Alcócer