Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu was a senior research scientist at Columbia University when she performed an experiment that changed the accepted view of the structure of the universe. She disproved one of the then widely accepted "laws" of physics - the conservation of parity - by proving that identical nuclear particles do not always act alike.

Dr. Wu, who immigrated to the United States from Shanghai in 1936 to study science, took her degree at the University of California at Berkeley. Her work at Columbia led physicists to discard the concept that parity was conserved and provided some of the basic material that led to a Nobel Price in 1957 for Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee and Dr. Chen-Ning Yang. Before Dr. Wu's experiment, physicists believed in parity conservation, that is, that nature is not biased toward left-handed or right-handed systems. She proved the existence of parity violation, which radically altered modern physical theory. Dr. Wu was 84 when she died this year.

Misha Mahowald
Research Scientist
Institute fuer Neuroinformaticks

Inducted into the WITI Hall of Fame June 7, 1996.

Misha Mahowald was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1963. She received her professional training at the California Institute of Technology with a B.S. in biology in 1985 and a was the first woman at Caltech to receive the Clauser Prize for her Ph.D. thesis in computational neuroscience in 1992. The Clauser Prize is awarded for work that demonstrates the potential of opening new avenues of human thought and endeavor.

Misha was definitely that kind of scientist and truly ahead of her time. During her doctoral and post-doctoral research she pioneered the emerging field of neuromorphic engineering which is the application of analog CMOS VLSI technology to the fabrication of analog electronic circuits that emulate real neural systems.

Her work continues today at the Institute fuer Neuroinformaticks in Zurich Switzerland under the direction of Dr. Kevin Martin and the close supervision of Dr. Rodney Douglas and a team of 20 scientists. Their goal is to identify the computational principles that make the brain so formidably versatile and powerful, and attempt to embody them into a new and innovative type of computer architecture.

Dr. Mahowald's work has received considerable acclaim including a major paper in Scientific American entitled "Silicon Retina", and has been featured in the popular scientific press and radio. In addition, she was one of five woman to be featured in the WGBH TV documentary, "Discovering Women." She was truly one of the most innovative and imaginative persons and her legacy of ideas continues on not only in Zurich, but in many parts of the world today. Misha Mahowald was 33 when she died in December of 1996.

Their loss will be greatly felt by the community of women for whom their pioneering spirit served as an example of what can be achieved.