Lise Meitner

Elise "Lise" Meitner ( MYTE-ner; German: [ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnɐ] ; 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian and Swedish nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission.

After completing her doctoral research in 1906, Meitner became the second woman to earn a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna. She spent much of her scientific career in Berlin, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. She was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She lost her positions in 1935 because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and the 1938 Anschluss resulted in the loss of her Austrian citizenship. On 13–14 July 1938, she fled to the Netherlands with the help of Dirk Coster. She lived in Stockholm for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen in 1949, but relocated to Britain in the 1950s to be with family members.

In mid-1938, chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry demonstrated that isotopes of barium could be formed by neutron bombardment of uranium. Meitner was informed of their findings by Hahn, and in late December, with her nephew, fellow physicist Otto Robert Frisch, she worked out the physics of this process by correctly interpreting Hahn and Strassmann's experimental data. On 13 January 1939, Frisch replicated the process Hahn and Strassmann had observed. In Meitner and Frisch's report in the February 1939 issue of Nature, they gave the process the name "fission". The discovery of nuclear fission led to the development of nuclear reactors and atomic bombs during World War II.