Meitner, Elise
The Austrian Elise Meitner (1878 - 1968), daughter to a lawyer, was a nuclear physicist.
She first worked in classical fields such as thermal conduction and optics.
In 1906, she was introduced to radioactivity. She helped to discover the radioactive element protactinium. She developed a physical separation method known as radioactive recoil.
In early 1920, she studied the continuous energy spectra of beta particles and was one of the first to demonstrate the existence of monoenergetic internal conversion electrons. She debated with Charles Drummond Ellis on whether gamma decay precedes or succeeds beta decay.
In 1938, Meitner lost her Austrian citizenship. Via The Netherlands she managed to escape to Sweden.
In Sweden, during the Christmas holiday in 1938, she was visited by her nephew Otto Robert Frisch. While he was there, she received the news that Otto Hahn and Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann in Berlin had discovered that the collision of a neutron with a uranium nucleus produced barium as one of its byproducts. She and her nephew hypothesized that uranium had split in two, and estimated the energy released.
The chemical element 109 meitnerium (Mt) is named in her honour.