Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner, born in November 1878, was a pioneering nuclear physicist whose contributions were vital to the discovery of nuclear fission. After earning her doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna in 1906, she became the second woman to achieve this milestone. Meitner's scientific journey took her to Berlin, where she served as a professor and department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, becoming the first woman to hold a full professorship in physics in Germany.

Her career faced significant challenges due to the rise of the Nazi regime. In 1935, Meitner lost her academic positions due to the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, and the subsequent Anschluss stripped her of her Austrian citizenship. With the assistance of Dirk Coster, she fled to the Netherlands in July 1938, eventually settling in Stockholm, where she became a Swedish citizen in 1949. In the 1950s, she moved to Britain to be closer to family.

In mid-1938, while at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered that barium isotopes could be produced through neutron bombardment of uranium. Meitner, informed by Hahn, collaborated with her nephew, physicist Otto Robert Frisch, to interpret these findings. Their work culminated in the coining of the term 'fission' in a report published in February 1939, which described the groundbreaking process that would later lead to the development of nuclear reactors and atomic bombs during World War II.

Despite her crucial role in the discovery of nuclear fission, Meitner was notably excluded from the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was awarded to Otto Hahn. This exclusion has been deemed unjust by many scientists and journalists. Throughout her career, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry nineteen times and for the Nobel Prize in Physics thirty times. Although she never received the Nobel Prize, Meitner was honored with various accolades, including the posthumous naming of element 109, meitnerium, in 1997. Albert Einstein famously praised her as the 'German Marie Curie.'