Lise Meitner was born in Vienna. At the age of thirty nine, already a known physicist, she moved to Berlin to conduct researches into radioactive substances with the famous chemist Otto Hahn. She became professor at the University of Berlin in 1926, one of the first women to reach that status. She stayed there for more than 20 years and served as the head of the physics department.
After the Anschluss (1938), she left for Sweden, where she joined the Nobel Institute in Stockholm. She remained in contact with Otto Hahn and received a letter from him describing the discovery (jointly with Fritz Strassmann), that when an uranium atom was disintegrated by a neutron, an atom of barium was thereby produced. Meitner discussed this discovery with her nephew Otto Frisch, who worked with Niels Bohr in Denmark. They understood the importance of the discovery, that during the process of splitting an atom of uranium into two roughly equal parts there is also a release of a great quantity of energy. Frisch called this procedure “fission”. Lise Meitner visited the USA in 1945, but returned to Sweden where she became a citizen in 1949. After she retired she left to Cambridge, England where she died.