Celebrating the Life and Accomplishments of Lise Meitner

On November 7, 1878, Austrian physicist Lise Meitner was born. Best known for her discoveries and work on nuclear fission, her scientific career spanned roughly 6 decades and included numerous awards and honors in the fields of physics and chemistry, although she notably was never awarded a Nobel Prize.

She was the second woman to be awarded a doctoral degree from the University of Vienna and became the first female professor of physics in Germany when she accepted a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. In the late 1930’s, she fled from Nazi Germany to live in Stockholm, Sweden where she continued her work but was not widely embraced by the scientific community there. In Sweden, she continued her collaboration with chemist Otto Hahn and co-discovered nuclear fission, but was not included in the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which Hahn was awarded for the discovery of nuclear fission.

Lise Meitner’s contributions to the scientific community were overlooked at the time, but will not be lost to history. This month, we are celebrating her remarkable life and accomplishments by featuring a selection of photographs taken throughout her scientific career.

If you are interested in finding out more about Lise Meitner’s accomplishments and the struggles she faced throughout her career, check out Ruth Lewin Sime’s biography Lise Meitner: a life in physics. For more photographs of Lise Meitner from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, type “Lise Meitner” into our Quick Search.