Editor's note: this article was originally posted on Los Alamos National Laboratory's website. 

Vincent “Vinny” Yuan, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, appears in a U.S. Postal Office video unveiling a stunning portrait of his mother on Feb. 11. The Chien-Shiung Wu Commemorative Forever Stamp was issued on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

Wu, who died in 1997 at age 84, made important contributions in the field of nuclear physics from the Manhattan Project to the demonstration of the effect called parity violation. A recent article in Science, “Postage stamp to honor female physicist who many say should have won the Nobel Prize,” details Wu’s contributions to experimental observations for which two of her colleagues received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics.

‘We’re very honored,” said Yuan, who works in the Applied and Fundamental Physics group at the Laboratory. “Like anybody, you’re proud of your mother. But it wasn’t just her accomplishments. It was the embodiment of all the qualities she believed in: hard work and not sweeping problems under the rug and seeing the bigger picture of things. She applied that to her work and to her students.”

She went by “Professor Wu” at Columbia University — even after she married physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan — as well as “Madame Wu” in a hat tip to Madame Marie Curie.

Bob King, acting group leader in Yuan’s division, has worked with Yuan for years — but only recently learned that his colleague’s mother was a famous physicist.

In response, Yuan said he had not been keeping his connection secret (he has even recently given a talk about Madame Wu to LANL’s Atomic Women group). “It’s just your real successes are what you do yourself, not based on someone else,” he said.