Primer: Chien-Shiung Wu July 8, 2009

Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) was born in Shanghai, China and raised nearby in Jiangsu Province.  Her father had been trained as an engineer and was the director of the Ming De School for Girls at the time of her birth.  Wu finished her education at her father’s school in 1922 and went on to the Soochow School for Girls in Nanjing, where she studied physics and mathematics on her own while undertaking a more classical formal education.  In 1930 she registered at the National Central University in Nanjing, and received a degree in physics in 1934.  She was also active in the student protests there that followed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

Wu did x-ray crystallography research for two years at the Chinese National Academy of Sciences in Shanghai.  In 1936 she sailed to America with financial support from an uncle in order to undertake graduate education at the University of Michigan.  On her way, she stopped and visited the University of California at Berkeley, where she met Ernest Lawrence (and her future husband Luke Yuan).  On learning that Michigan did not allow women in its student union, she opted to pursue her PhD at Berkeley instead, receiving it in 1940 for work on nuclear decay (more…)