Chien-Shiung Wu. Historical portrait of Chinese-born American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) in 1958. She is working in her laboratory at New York's Columbia University, USA, where she became physics professor in 1957. In 1956, Wu and Tsung-Dao Lee experimentally confirmed a theory that parity is violated during weak radioactive decay, overturning many basic assumptions of particle physics. Wu experimentally confirmed other particle theories, as well as studying muonic atom X-ray spectra.