Education Following her early education, Chien-Shiung Wu went on to the National Central University in Nanjing Initially, she sought to obtain a mathematics degree before later switching to physics, which she graduated from in 1934. In 1936, she arrived in San Francisco and attended the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley she met her husband, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, who was a fellow physicist at the time. Graduated with her PhD in Physics in 1940. In 1944, during WWII, she worked on the Manhattan Project (secretive research sanctioned by the American Government that  culminated in the creation of the first atomic bomb). Following the war, she went on to teach and conduct research at Columbia University.