Austrian physicist Lise Meitner was not only part of the scientific team that discovered nuclear fission, she was also vocal about the destructive potential the reaction had and spoke out against nuclear weapons. Born November 7, 1878 in Vienna, Austria, Meitner was privately tutored by her father, as girls were not allowed to attend the regular local high school. She entered the University of Vienna in 1901 after passing their difficult entrance exams, where according to the Jewish Women’s Archive she was the first woman admitted to school’s physics lectures and laboratories. She went on to become the second woman to ever earn a doctorate degree from the university in 1906, per the Atomic Heritage Foundation. Meitner then relocated to  Berlin, Germany where she attended the lectures of physicist Max Planck, best known for his discovery of the quantum of action, which laid the groundwork for quantum theory and eventually earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. 

Meitner became Planck’s assistant after a year and worked as an unpaid research scientist at the Berlin Institute of Chemistry where, along with other women, she was denied access to the institute’s labs. She met radio-chemist Otto Hahn in 1907 and the two worked together for the next 30 years. They discovered the isotope of protactinium in 1917 and Meitner won the Leibniz Medal. Hahn was eventually named the Administrative Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, while Meitner supervised the institutes Physics Section for over 20 years. In 1926 she became Germany’s first female full professor, per Scientific American.

Lise Meitner discovered barium as well as nuclear fission

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Meitner was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times but never won

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