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Li Minhua (; 2 November 1917 – 19 January 2013), also known as Minghua Lee Wu, was a Chinese aerospace engineer and physicist who was an expert in solid mechanics. The first woman to earn a PhD in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was one of the founding scientists at the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and was elected as an academician in 1980. Her husband Wu Zhonghua was also an accomplished physicist and CAS academician.
After graduation from MIT, Li and Wu both joined the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the predecessor of NASA) as research scientists. She published several NACA reports, and was elected to the Sigma Xi honor society.
With the outbreak of the Korean War, relations between the US and the newly established People's Republic of China turned openly hostile, and Li and Wu decided they could no longer work for the US military. They resigned from NACA and became professors at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1951. In 1954, they resolved to return to China. To avoid suspicion of the US government, the family flew to Britain in August ostensibly for a vacation. From there they traveled through Switzerland and Austria to Czechoslovakia, finally arriving in Beijing at the end of the year via the Soviet Union.
Li made major contributions to aerospace research in China. Her paper "General plastic behaviour and method of solution for plane stress problems with axial symmetry in strain hardening range considering finite strain" won the State Natural Science Award (third class) in 1956. In 1959, she led a team that designed China's first instantaneous heat load testing system for the satellite carrier rocket. In the 1970s, she developed a method to analyze defects in aerospace turbomachinery, and won the 1978 Major Achievement Award from the CAS. Her research on engine defects led to her later focus on material fatigue, which she extensively researched until she was in her eighties. Starting in 1982, she organized a biennial national conference on material fatigue.
Li died on 19 January 2013, at the age of 95.
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