Lise Meitner

Meitner, born into a Jewish family in Vienna (she later converted to Protestantism), was a pioneering nuclear physicist who worked for decades in Berlin with Otto Hahn. Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, she and her nephew Otto Frisch provided the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission after Hahn's experiments, coining the term and calculating the enormous energy released. The Nobel committee overlooked her, but element 109, meitnerium, is named in her honor.