Chien-Shiung Wu Scholarship

The Chien-Shiung Wu Scholarship honors the legacy of one of the most influential experimental physicists of the twentieth century and celebrates graduate students who exemplify her commitment to scientific excellence, innovation, and perseverance. Established through the generosity of the Wu family, the scholarship recognizes Physics PhD students with outstanding academic achievement and exceptional promise as emerging researchers.

Her groundbreaking experiments established the properties of the weak interaction. Her most startling achievement was the observation of parity non-conservation in beta decay and she demonstrated that there is a fundamental difference between right and left. Her experiments were a large and essential step toward unifying the electromagnetic and weak interactions. She is also credited with the first experiment to document entangled photons. A 2023 article in Scientific American discusses her experiment in relation to the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, providing a fascinating review of her life and work.

Dr. Wu was the first female President of APS (1974) and she received the National Medal of Science (1975), the Inaugural Wolf Prize (1978), the Woman of the Year St Vincent Medal, UNESCO (1981) and 19 honorary doctorates. In 2021, she was honored with a commemorative U.S. postage stamp with the citation “During a career that spanned more than 40 years in a field dominated by men, she established herself as the authority on conducting precise and accurate research to test fundamental theories of physics.” The department proudly honors Dr. Wu in the atrium entrance to Pupin Hall, where visitors can see her picture hanging among Columbia Physics's fourteen Nobel Prize winners.

Dr. Wu was a powerful advocate for correcting non-equality in the treatment of women in the sciences. As she noted in a 1964 speech at the Symposium of American Women in Science and Engineering:

“In science and technology we dedicate ourselves to the study of nature, to the understanding of our environment, and incidentally to the betterment of our life, It is the highest form of aspiration as well as satisfaction. It is a fulfillment of human passion. If, in this human society, women are endowed with just as many intellectual capabilities as men, why then should they be deprived of such aspiration and fulfillment?…The lack of women in science is also a terrible waste of potential talent.”

Later, in a 1983 speech at Radcliffe College, she went straight to the point: “The presence of so few senior women has a profoundly negative influence on the education of both women and men.” 

Chien-Shiung Wu Scholars

  • 2012: Fereshte Ghahari
  • 2015: Joy Didier
  • 2017: Claire Warner
  • 2018: Elena Busch
  • 2019: Jiawei Zang
  • 2020: Silvia Fernanda, Cardenas Lopez, and Yinjie Guo
  • 2022: Nupur Oza and Sarah Fields
  • 2023: Maria Bressan
  • 2024: Lucia Rondini

For more information on the Wu Scholarship, please contact Morgan May at [email protected].