Chien-Shiung Wu was born following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty at Liuhe, a small town near Shanghai, China. When Chien-Shiung grew up girls were taught at home (if at all). Chien-Shiung's father encouraged his daughter to take a class with a professor who recognized Chien-Shiung's gift for learning and encouraged her to enter the National Central University in Nanjing, where she received her degree in 1934.

Wu came to the United States in 1936 to continue her studies. She received a PhD from the University of California in 1940 and taught in several colleges before settling at Columbia University in 1944, where she spent 37 years researching and teaching. Wu met her husband at Berkeley and married in 1942. Wu and her husband lived in the same apartment for 50 years and had one son, Vincent Yuan.

Chien-Shiung received a number of honors and was very dedicated to her scientific research. She was a very respected physicist who disproved the law of conservation of parity and showed that the laws of nature are not always symmetrical with respect to right and left. Wu won many scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Comstock Prize, and the first honorary doctorate awarded to a woman at Princeton University.

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