Lise Meitner Biography
                     Lise Meitner Biography
Introduction
Lise Meitner was a pioneering physicist who 
studied radioactivity and nuclear physics. She 
was part of a team that discovered nuclear 
fission a term she coined but she was 
overlooked in 1945 when her colleague Otto 
Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize in 
Chemistry. 
Source: www.livescience.com
About Lisa Meitner 
Austrian Lisa Meitner was often the lone 
women in groups of European scientists 
researching radioactivity. 
Her influential work in the early 20th century 
made her a target of the Nazis, so she fled to 
Sweden in 1938 and it was there that she 
discovered the power of the fission reaction.
Source: jwa.org
Nuclear fission
The dramatic splitting of the atom— “nuclear 
fission”—was a discovery which changed our 
world. Yet few know that it was a woman 
physicist who discovered the power of 
nuclear energy just after her dramatic escape 
from Nazi Germany. 
Source: jwa.org
Meitner’s exclusion from sharing 
the Nobel Prize 
The irony of the story of Lise Meitner is that 
her laboratory partner of thirty years, Otto 
Hahn, who remained in Berlin throughout the 
Third Reich, was awarded the Nobel Prize for 
Chemistry in 1944. 
Meitner’s exclusion from sharing the Nobel 
Prize was thus integrally related to her 
escape from Nazi Germany to Sweden and the 
consequent social “marginalization” of her 
important physics research and discoveries. 
Source: jwa.org
Early Life
Lise’s parents were assimilated Viennese 
Jews, who did not practice Judaism. Her 
father Philipp was a lawyer whose family 
stemmed from Moravia. 
In 1873 he married Hedwig Skovran, whose 
family had emigrated from Russia to Slovakia. 
They had eight children. Lise was born on 
November 7, 1878.
Source: jwa.org
Education
Lise focused her talents upon passing the 
difficult entrance examination to the 
University of Vienna, since girls in Austria 
were not permitted to attend the normal 
boys’ high school. At age 23, she was the first 
woman admitted to the university’s physics 
lectures and laboratories.
Source: jwa.org
Early Research
Lise Meitner was the second woman to 
receive a Ph.D. in Physics from the University 
of Vienna and it was there that she was 
introduced to Max Planck, father of the 
quantum theory, who traveled to Vienna 
after the tragic suicide of Boltzmann. 
Source: jwa.org
Research on radioactive processes
Meitner’s pioneering research on radioactive 
processes led her into an interdisciplinary 
field in which chemists collaborated with 
physicists in primitive laboratories, often 
tracing the “tracks” of decaying particles by 
eye long into the night. 
Source: jwa.org
Work During Nazi Regime
Meitner became an official University 
Lecturer in 1922, but even in liberalizing 
Berlin the press jokingly reported the topic of 
her inaugural speech as “Cosmetic Physics” 
instead of cosmic physics. 
Source: jwa.org
Death
Meitner spent most of her 70s and 80s 
traveling, encouraging women students to 
“remember that science can bring both joy 
and satisfaction to your life.” During her final 
years she lived close to her nephew Otto 
Robert Frisch, in Cambridge, England, where 
she died on October 27, 1968.
Source: jwa.org