Austria-Hungary
Lise Meitner
1878–1968 Physicist, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry; Austro-Hungarian Army X-ray nurse-technician, 1915–1916
Born in Vienna, Lise Meitner took a doctorate in physics at its university and moved to Berlin, where she worked for years with the chemist Otto Hahn at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. From 1915 to 1916 she served as an X-ray nurse-technician in the Austro-Hungarian Army. In 1917 she became head of her own physics section, and in 1917–18 she and Hahn discovered the long-lived mother isotope of actinium, an isotope of element 91, which they named protactinium. She fled Germany in 1938 and with her nephew Otto Robert Frisch later explained and named nuclear fission. Many consider it an omission that she did not share Hahn's 1944 Nobel Prize.