once rebelled against Yuan Shikai. Yuan showed her the Radiation Laboratory, where the director was Ernest O. Lawrence, who would soon win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron particle accelerator. Wu was shocked at the sexism in American society when she learned that at Michigan women were not even allowed to use the front entrance, and decided that she would prefer to study at the more liberal Berkeley in California. Wu was also influenced by her interest in the Berkeley facilities which included the first cyclotron of Lawrence, but her decision would disappoint Dong who studied at Michigan on her own. Yuan took her to see Raymond T. Birge, the head of the physics department, and he offered Wu a place in the graduate school despite the fact that the academic year had already commenced. Wu firmly abandoned her plans to study at Michigan and enrolled at Berkeley. Her Berkeley classmates included Robert R. Wilson, who like others secretly admired Wu, and George Volkoff; her closest friends included post-doctoral student Margaret Lewis and Ursula Schaefer, a history student who chose to remain in the United States rather than return to Nazi Germany. Wu sorely missed Chinese cuisine and was not impressed with the food at Berkeley, so she always dined with friends such as Schaeffer at her favorite restaurant, the Tea Garden. Wu and her friends would get free meals that were not part of the menu due to her friendship with the owner. Wu applied for a scholarship at the end of her first year, but there was prejudice against Asian students from the department head Birge, and Wu and Yuan were instead offered a readership with a lower stipend. Yuan then applied for, and secured, a scholarship at Caltech. Birge however respected Wu for her talents and was the reason Wu could enroll even though the academic year already started. Wu made rapid progress in her education and her research. Although Lawrence was officially her supervisor, she also worked closely with the famous Italian physicist Emilio Segrè. She quickly became his favorite student and the two conducted studies on beta decay, including xenon, which would provide important results in the future of nuclear bombs. According to Segrè, Wu was a popular student who was talented. In his autobiography, Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez said of Wu, I got to know this graduate