Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) was a Chinese-American experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the field of nuclear physics.​ She is known as “the First Lady of Physics”, “the Chinese Madame Curie”, and the “Queen of Nuclear Research”.
 

Chien-Shiung studied physics at a university in Shanghai, where one of her professors had worked with none other than Marie Curie. After graduating, she became a research assistant before deciding to pursue further education in America. Despite being encouraged to earn her PhD at the University of Michigan, she chose not to because women weren’t allowed to enter the building through the front entrance. She completed her PhD at Berkeley in 1940.
 

In 1944, Chien-Shiung joined the Manhattan Project at the Substitute Alloy Materials Lab, focusing on radiation detectors. She helped develop the process for separating uranium metal into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. When a B reactor shut down mysteriously soon after it began operating, she helped identify poisoning by xenon-135 as the culprit.
 

Chien-Shiung is most known for conducting the Wu experiment, which contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation of parity. This discovery led to her two male colleagues winning the Nobel Prize in physics in 1957, but her work was not acknowledged. Her work was not publicly honoured until 1978 when she was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics.