“…it is shameful that there are so few women in science… In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments yet she remains eternally feminine.”

Chien-Shiung Wu was born on May 31^st, 1912 in Liuhe, Jiangsu, China. Wu grew up with supportive parents who encouraged her to pursue her passion since a young age. Wu used this opportunity to read scientific articles and listen to education radio since a young age. Throughout high school, here interests in science would slowly grow and culminated a B.S. in physics at National Central University in Nanjing in 1934. During her studies, Wu led protests against the Chinese Civil War. Wu worked as an assistant at Zhejiang University before enrolling in a Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Michigan in 1936. With the outbreak of WW2, Wu would not visit China or see her immediate family again. Upon arriving to the U.S., Wu would transfer to UC-Berkeley, largely due to sexism at Michigan, where she studied Beta decay and graduate in 1940. Unable to return to China, Wu worked as a post-doc until 1944, then joined the Manhattan project. In 1952, Wu became the 1^st woman tenured physics faculty at Columbia University. 1956, Wu would perform the ‘Wu Experiment’ and disprove the conservation of parity in weak interactions of fundamental particles. For her work, she was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.