student in this idle time. She used the same room next door, and was called "Gee Gee" [Wu's nickname at Berkeley]. She was the most talented and most beautiful experimental physicist I have ever met. Segrè recognized Wu's brilliance and compared her to Wu's heroine Marie Curie, whom Wu always quoted, but said that Wu was more "worldly, elegant, and witty." Meanwhile, Lawrence described Wu as "the most talented female experimental physicist he had ever known, and that she would make any laboratory shine." When it came time to present her thesis in 1940, it had two separate parts presented in very neat fashion. The first was on bremsstrahlung, the electromagnetic radiation produced by the deceleration of a charged particle when deflected by another charged particle, typically an electron by an atomic nucleus, with the latter being on radioactive Xe. She investigated the first study using beta-emitting phosphorus-32, a radioactive isotope easily produced in the cyclotron that Lawrence and his brother John H. Lawrence were evaluating for use in cancer treatment and as a radioactive tracer. This marked Wu's first work with beta decay, a subject on which she would become an authority. The second part of the thesis was about the production of radioactive isotopes of Xe produced by the nuclear fission of uranium with the 37-inch and 60-inch cyclotrons at the Radiation Laboratory. Her second part on Xe and nuclear fission so impressed her committee, which featured Lawrence and J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom Wu affectionately called, "Oppie", that Oppenheimer believed that Wu knew everything about the absorption cross section of neutrons, a concept that would be applied when Wu joined the Manhattan Project. Wu completed her PhD in June 1940, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the US academic honor society. In spite of Lawrence and Segrè's recommendations, she could not secure a faculty position at a university, so she remained at the Radiation Laboratory as a post-doctoral fellow. Because of her early achievements, the Oakland Tribune released an issue on her entitled "Outstanding Research in Nuclear Bombardments by a Petite Chinese Lady". The report quipped, A petite Chinese girl worked side by side with some top US scientists in the laboratory studying nuclear collisions. This girl is the new member of the Berkeley physics research team. Ms. Wu, or more appropriately Dr. Wu, looks as though she might be an actress or an artist or a