Chien-Shiung Wu was born on May 31, 1912, near Shanghai, China. Her father founded an all-girls school. At the time in China, it was not encouraged for girls to get an education, and having your daughter accepted to a school was almost impossible. Thanks to her father, Chien-Shiung Wu developed a love of physics and mathematics. She graduated at the top of her class in 1934, earning her degree in physics at the National Central University in Nanking, China. Her mentor, Jing-wei Gu, who was another female physicist, encouraged Chien-Shiung Wu to further her education in America. One of her American professors, Ernst Lawrence, won the Nobel Prize in 1939 for inventing the cyclotron.
In 1942, she married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan. They met at the University. Due to World War I, nobody from the families attended. Dr. Wu moved to the East Coast, where she became the first female faculty member to teach in the physics department at Princeton University in New Jersey. Soon after, she moved to New York and joined the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb. She is credited with helping develop Geiger counters to detect radiation and with refining uranium in large quantities. She had made plans to visit her family in China, but the Chinese Civil War had started, and her father told her to never return to Communist China to keep her safe. She finally went back to Chia in 1973, only to find that her parents had died and their tombs destroyed in the fighting; her Uncle and brother had also perished in the fighting.
Dr. Wu continued her pioneering work in physics, and her work even crossed into medicine and biology. She researched the molecular mutations that cause sickle-cell disease. She was never given the Nobel Prize she deserved, but she won many more awards, like being the 7th woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1958. She was also the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. In 1990, an asteroid was named after her: 2752 Wu Chien-Shiung. Dr. Wu died of a stroke in 1997. Her ashes were buried on the campus of the Mingde School in China, where she was enrolled as a child.
