Chien-Shiung Wu is a female Chinse American nuclear physicist. Wu’s ancestral home is located in Liuhe Town of Taicang, Jiangsu Province. Her husband was the Chinese American nuclear physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan. Upon her graduation from Suzhou No. 2 Women’s Normal School in 1927, she became a primary school teacher. Two years later, Wu was admitted to the Department of Mathematics of the National Central University in Nanjing. She was transferred to the Department of Physics a year later. In 1934, she received her bachelor’s degree and worked as a teaching assistant at the Department of Physics of Zhejiang University. Later, she became a research fellow at the Academia Sinica. The year of 1940 saw Wu’s reception of her doctoral degree from the University of California. At first, she engaged herself in research on the radioactive gas xenon and then started to work on the Manhattan Project of atomic bomb development in 1944. In 1952, she served as an associate professor at the University of Columbia and was promoted to be a professor in 1958. In the same year, Wu was awarded an honorary doctorate degree of science by Princeton University and was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. She became a professor of physics at Princeton University in 1972. In 1975, Wu served as the first female president of the American Physical Society, and was awarded the National Medal of Science. She retired in 1982 and was invited to be an honorary professor of Nanjing University, Peking University, University of Science and Technology of China and a member of the Academic Committee of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1957, Wu’s experiments of β decay determined the presence of non-conservation of parity in weak interactions. In 1963, she provided solid experimental confirmation of the conservation of vector current in beta decay. Thus, Wu was recognized as an internationally important scholar in the field of β decay. She made outstanding contributions to the development of nuclear physics and particle physics. Her honors included the Wolf Prize of Physics awarded to her in 1978. In 1994, she was elected as one of the first foreign academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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