Marie Curie

Born Maria Skladowska in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867, Marie Curie was to seriously test the old adage that a woman’s place was in the home. A largely penniless student who worked as a governess and tutor while pursuing her dream of becoming a physicist (an unheard of occupation for a woman in the nineteenth century) she eventually found her way to Paris in 1891 where she found work at the laboratory of physicist Gabriel Lippman while continuing her studies at the Sorbonne.  While there, she met a physics and chemistry instructor by the name of Pierre Curie, in whom she found a kindred spirit. The two married in 1895, becoming the first husband and wife science team in history, and set about on a short but spectacular career that would make them Nobel Prize winning physicists and their names synonymous with the science of modern chemistry. What makes Madame Currie so remarkable—besides being the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, was that she continued to carry on with her husband’s work after his death in 1905 (likely as a result of their experiments with radiation), going on to become the first female head of Laboratory at the Sorbonne University in Paris and winning a second Nobel Prize, this one in Chemistry, in 1911 (which made her the first person to win two Nobel prizes—an accomplishment not to be repeated until Linus Pauling was awarded a second prize in 1962). No doubt her accomplishments served as a source of inspiration for the thousands of women scientists and researchers who were to follow later.