{"id":916,"date":"2023-03-08T18:34:15","date_gmt":"2023-03-08T18:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/?p=916"},"modified":"2023-03-08T18:34:15","modified_gmt":"2023-03-08T18:34:15","slug":"international-womens-day-spotlight-dr-chung-kwai-lui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/2023\/03\/08\/international-womens-day-spotlight-dr-chung-kwai-lui\/","title":{"rendered":"International Women’s Day Spotlight: Dr. Chung Kwai Lui"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For International Women’s Day, I’m reposting a history of one of our most distinguished alumni, Dr. Chung\u00a0Kwai\u00a0Lui. Dr. Lui was the first woman to receive a doctorate in any field from OSU and was nationally recognized for her work on the Manhattan project and at Westinghouse on phosphor development. The Wei Family Private Foundation <\/a> has established a scholarship in honor of her and her husband Hsin Hsu Wei. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This was originally posted on our website as \u00a0OSU\u2019s\u00a0First\u00a0Woman\u00a0Physics\u00a0PhD<\/a> by Ken Krane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is more information about Dr. Lui and legacy provided by the Wei Family <\/a>P<\/a>r<\/a>i<\/a>v<\/a>a<\/a>t<\/a>e<\/a> <\/a>Foundation <\/a>in this article<\/a> from the College of Science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dr.<\/figure>
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Chung Kwai Lui was\u00a0born\u00a0in Canton, China in\u00a01909. In\u00a01929, she enrolled\u00a0at Lingnan University, which had been established as a Christian college in 1888 by American missionaries in Guangzhou. The reputation of the college grew quickly, and by 1918 the leading U.S. universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, were accepting its students for graduate programs. Miss Lui chose physics as her major and completed her undergraduate degree in 1933. In addition to the regular curriculum of physics courses, she also took courses in science teaching, and from 1933 until 1936 she taught physics at the middle-school level.\u00a0At\u00a0the\u00a0same\u00a0time\u00a0she\u00a0enrolled\u00a0in\u00a0graduate\u00a0courses\u00a0in\u00a0physics\u00a0at Lingnan\u00a0University.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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In 1936, the Oregon State chapter of Phi Kappa Phi (an academic honor society) offered Miss Lui an exchange scholarship, which covered her tuition and room. She moved into Snell Hall, which was then a women\u2019s dormitory. She was one of thefirst two students to enroll in the newly formed physics graduate program at Oregon State. Within one year, she had completed and defended her M.S. thesis, Diffusion Phenomena in Strong Magnetic Fields, under the supervision of Professor Willibald Weniger, who was also chair of the Physics Department. Her experimental work studied the magnetic field and temperature dependence of the time for the diffusion of aqueous dye solutions. She continued on to study for a Ph.D. inphysics, which she completed in 1941 under the supervision of Professor James Brady. Her thesis, The Crystal Photoeffect in D-Tartaric Acid Single Crystals, concerned a process analogous the better-known photoelectric effect in metals, in which light shining on certain crystals causes a current to flow. She immediately published her Ph.D. thesis work in the Physical Review<\/em>, the leading U.S. journal of physics research, as a single-authored paper (vol. 60, pages 529-531).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following\u00a0the\u00a0completion of her\u00a0Ph.D. she taught as\u00a0an\u00a0instructor at Oregon State for several years, and then she was hired by the Westinghouse Lamp Research Laboratory in New Jersey, where she studied phosphors and fluorescent lamps. Westinghouse was also investigating materials for possible use as filaments in incandescent lighting, among which was uranium. So during the Manhattan Project, which was the highly secret U.S. effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War II, the Westinghouse expertise\u00a0in\u00a0purifying\u00a0microscopic\u00a0quantities\u00a0of\u00a0uranium\u00a0was\u00a0instead\u00a0applied\u00a0to\u00a0kilogram quantities,\u00a0and Dr. Lui turned her skills to that project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although she had originally entered the U.S. on a student visa, which would normally have required her to return to China to apply for admission as a permanent resident (the path to citizenship), the U.S. government did not want her knowledge of the atomic research program to fall into the hands of the Communist\u00a0Party,\u00a0which\u00a0had\u00a0taken\u00a0over\u00a0control\u00a0of\u00a0China.\u00a0So\u00a0in 1949\u00a0the\u00a0Congress\u00a0passed,\u00a0and\u00a0President Harry Truman immediately signed, a bill \u201cfor the relief of Doctor Chung Kwai Lui,\u201d which read in part \u201cthe Attorney General is authorized and directed to record Dr. Chung Kwai Lui as having entered the United\u00a0States in\u00a01936\u00a0for permanent residence.\u201d This\u00a0bill in effect retroactively changed\u00a0the status under which she had entered the U.S. and thus permitted her to stay. Also in 1949 she married Mr. Hsin Hsu Wei, who had emigrated from China after the war, received a master\u2019s degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University, and also was employed by Westinghouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Chung Kwai Lui Wei remained at Westinghouse, mostly doing research into the properties of phosphors, until she retired in 1974. She published several papers in physics journals on her work with phosphors, and she is the holder of 2 patents, one in the U.S. and the other in Canada. She died in 2008 at the age of 98. She and her husband (who died in 2000) recognized the value that higher education had played in their lives, and they left their estate to establish the Wei Family Private Foundation, which supports scholarships for students of Chinese ancestry who are studying engineering or science at Oregon State or electrical engineering at Columbia. This wonderful legacy will continue to provide support for students at OSU who hope to follow the exemplary path established by the first woman to earn a physics Ph.D. at Oregon State.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For International Women’s Day, I’m reposting a history of one of our most distinguished alumni, Dr. Chung\u00a0Kwai\u00a0Lui. Dr. Lui was the first woman to receive a doctorate in any field from OSU and was nationally recognized for her work on the Manhattan project and at Westinghouse on phosphor development. The Wei Family Private Foundation has… Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6866,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1500,1138649,3428,784,199138,523],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","category-diversity-in-physics","category-graduate-students","category-history","category-in-memorium","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6866"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=916"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":918,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions\/918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spectrometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}