Chien-Shiung Wu (born 31.05.1913) is an American experimental physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1958). She was born in Shanghai (China). She graduated from the National Central University (China, 1934), received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley (1940) and continued her studies at Smith College and at Princeton. From 1958 she has been professor of physics at Columbia University.
Her work was in the fields of nuclear physics and the physics of weak interactions. In 1957 she proved experimentally the nonconservation of parity in beta decay, and in 1964 the conservation of the vector current in beta decay and of the number of leptons.
In 1975 she was president of the American Physical Society. National Medal of Science (1975), T. Bonner Prize (1975) and others.