Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner earned her physics doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1906, the second woman to do so, then spent most of her career in Berlin as a professor and department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry - the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. The Nuremberg Laws stripped her positions in 1935; the 1938 Anschluss took her citizenship. On 13-14 July 1938, she fled to the Netherlands with Dirk Coster's help, eventually settling in Stockholm and becoming a Swedish citizen in 1949. That December, her former colleague Otto Hahn sent word of strange experimental results: neutron bombardment of uranium was yielding barium isotopes. With her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, she interpreted the data correctly, named the process "fission" in their February 1939 Nature report, and set the ground for both reactors and bombs. Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery - an exclusion many have called unjust - though Meitner was invited to the Lindau Nobel meeting in 1962, and element 109 was named meitnerium in her honor in 1997.