1st Annual C.S. Wu Memorial Lecture A Resounding Success!
To a lecture hall of 100 students, faculty, staff, and visitors, the Columbia University Department of Physics successfully launched the 1st Annual Chien-Shiung (C.S.) Wu Memorial Lecture, drawing outstanding reviews for distinguished speaker Dr. Elena Aprile.
This special honorary colloquium was held in honor of C.S. Wu, a distinguished particle and experimental physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and taught and conducted research at Columbia University.
To a lecture hall of 100 students, faculty, staff, and visitors, the Columbia University Department of Physics successfully launched the 1st Annual Chien-Shiung (C.S.) Wu Memorial Lecture, drawing outstanding reviews for distinguished speaker Dr. Elena Aprile.
This special honorary colloquium was held in honor of C.S. Wu, a distinguished particle and experimental physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and taught and conducted research at Columbia University.
Dr. Wu dedicated her career to making decisive contributions to the fields of nuclear and particle physics and was best known for leading the Wu Experiment which contradicted the Law of Conservation of Parity and helped her colleagues, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1957. Wu, herself, received the inaugural Wolf Prize in physics in 1978.
This year’s Wu Lecturer, Dr. Elena Aprile, leads a team of dedicated Columbia University research staff and Graduate Students who make up the XENON Project's team of more than 180 scientists from all over the world; working together since 2006 to prove the existence of dark matter by detecting it directly in a terrestrial experiment. These efforts are conducted domestically and internationally, both within the walls of Columbia University’s Pupin Hall and deep beneath the mountains of central Italy at the Gran Sasso Underground National Laboratory.
Gran Sasso, which happens to be one of the world's largest underground laboratories, is where her team works to find dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) through the use of massive yet ultra-low background liquid xenon time projection chambers. This technology is the front-runner to produce the field's most direct evidence of dark matter's existence in the form of WIMPs, which will represent a ground-breaking discovery in both physics and cosmology.
During the lecture, Dr. Aprile spoke highly of C.S. Wu, referring to her as "one of the most illustrious members of the Columbia Physics Department" and "the greatest female physicist of the 20th century." As Dr. Aprile so poignantly stated, "Madame Wu is an inspiration for every woman interested in physics, and she surely has been a role model for me."
"Madame Wu is an inspiration for every woman interested in physics, and she surely has been a role model for me."
To view the CS Wu Memorial Lecture please see the video on the Physics Department's webpage. Please note, a Columbia UNI will be required for viewing.