Chien-Shiung Wu

Sunday, January 01, 1956

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in China in 1912 and immigrated to the United States in 1934 to pursue her PhD in physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Wu was a pioneering experimental physicist who in 1956, "provided the first experimental proof that the principle of parity conservation does not hold in weak subatomic interactions." Her experiments disproved the long-held principle of parity conservation, contributing to a Nobel Prize awarded to her male collaborators, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, while she was overlooked. In 1975, Wu received the National Medal of Science.