Marie Curie

Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie (Polish: [ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska kiˈri] ; née Skłodowska; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), better known as Marie Curie ( KURE-ee; French: [maʁi kyʁi] ), was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie "for their joint researches on the radioactivity phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".

She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. Marie and Pierre were the first married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.

She was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Flying University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her elder sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. In 1895, she married Pierre Curie, with whom she conducted pioneering research on radioactivity—a term she coined. In 1906, Pierre died in a Paris street accident.