Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was native of Vienna and moved to Berlin in 1907. She continued her training in physics and began a fruitful collaboration with the chemist Otto Hahn at the Chemical Institute, who was looking for a physicist to do research on radioactivity. In 1912, she became the first female assistant in physics in Prussia, when she was invited by the prominent physicist Max Planck to work at the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

In 1917 she advanced to the head of the Institute’s physical-radioactive department and together with Hahn, discovered protactinium (element 91), the heaviest extent natural element. Between 1920 and 1934 Meitner conducted studies independent from Hahn’s that laid the foundations of nuclear physics.

Despite Nazi rule, Meitner’s Austrian citizenship and the semi-private nature of her work allowed her to continue working in Germany after 1933. In 1938, she fled to Sweden and continued her work at the Nobel Institute for Physics in Stockholm, where she made her most significant contribution to physics: nuclear fission.  Despite her success, it was Otto Hahn who received the Nobel Prize in 1944, an injustice that Meitner was never able to forget.