Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner worked with Otto Hahn on radioactivity for three decades before being forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938 because she was Jewish. From exile in Sweden that December, she and her nephew Otto Frisch worked out the physics behind Hahn's puzzling experimental results, correctly explaining that uranium nuclei had split, and named the process nuclear fission. The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Hahn alone; later review of the Nobel committee's own sealed records found the chemistry committee unable to fairly judge Meitner's physics contribution, and she was nominated forty nine times for a Nobel Prize across her career without ever receiving one.