Wu’s research as part of the instrumentation group included improving Geiger counters for the detection of radiation and the enrichment of uranium in large quantities. She also helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. In addition, she was the first person to develop an experiment to confirm Enrico Fermi’s 1933 theory of beta decay, a type of radioactive decay in which a proton is transformed into a neutron (or vice versa) and unstable atoms become more stable as their ratio of protons to neutrons becomes equal. At that time, Manhattan Project researchers were working secretly towards the creation of an atomic bomb. Wu moved East with her family to take teaching positions first at Smith College, then Princeton University, and finally Columbia University, where she joined the infamous Manhattan Project in 1944. Because World War II was raging when they wed in 1942, neither of them could share the happy news with their families back home. Between 19, she completed a PhD in nuclear fission at the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Lawrence. At Berkeley, Wu also met and married Chinese-born physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan (who was a grandson of Shikai Yuan, the first albeit short-lived President of the Republic of China). With financial support from an uncle, Wu emigrated by ship across the Pacific Ocean, bound for graduate school in the San Francisco Bay Area. After graduation, she joined a lab led by another female physicist, Jing-Wei Gu, who encouraged Wu to continue her education in the United States. She went on to study physics at National Central University in Nanjing, graduating at the top of her class in 1934. Unusual for the time, their father advocated for girls receiving an equal education to such an extent that he founded the Mingde Women’s Vocational Continuing School, which young Wu attended. Their mother Fan-Hua Fan was a teacher, and their father Zhong-Yi Wu was an engineer who played an active role in the early years of the political rebellion. SIA2010-1509īorn May 31, 1912, just after the Chinese Revolution began, Chien-Shiung Wu grew up with two brothers in a small town near Shanghai. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 90-105, Science Service Records, Image No.
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