Chung-Yao Chao

He entered Nanjing Higher Normal School (later renamed National Southeastern University, National Central University and Nanjing University), in 1920 and earned a BS in physics in 1925. Then he earned a PhD degree in physics under supervision of Nobel Prize laureate Robert Andrews Millikan at California Institute of Technology in 1930. Later he went back to China and joined the physics faculty of Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Nobel Prize controversy

The 1936 Nobel Prize for Physics went to Carl D. Anderson for the discovery of the positron. While a graduate student at Caltech in 1930, Chao was the first to experimentally identify positrons through electron–positron annihilation, but did not realize what they were. Anderson, Chao's classmate at Caltech, used the same radioactive source, ²⁰⁸
Tl, as Chao. (Historically, ²⁰⁸
Tl was known as "thorium C double prime" or "ThC", see decay chains.) Fifty years later, Anderson admitted that Chao had inspired his discovery: Chao's research formed the foundation from which much of Anderson's own work developed. Chao died in 1998, without sharing in a Nobel Prize acknowledgment.