Marie Sklodowska Curie is the only person to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes in science. She was born in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867. When she finished her secondary education, she went to Paris and became a governess to help pay for her sister's medical studies there. In 1891, Curie began her studies at the Sorbonne and joined Dr. Gabriel Lippmann's laboratory two years later. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie, with whom she worked until his untimely death in 1906.

Marie Curie was awarded a Ph.D. in 1903 for her work on the discovery and isolation of two elements, polonium and radium. That same year, Marie, her husband Pierre, and Henri Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of radioactivity. Marie was the first to use the terms "radioactive" and "radioactivity" to describe the elements exhibiting this property of matter, as well as the property itself. In 1904 she became the chief research assistant in Pierre Curie's laboratory at the Sorbonne. In 1906, after Pierre's passing, she was appointed to Pierre's vacant professorship and became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to her five years later for the isolation of pure radium.

Marie Curie established the Radium Institute at the University of Paris in 1914, which became a worldwide center for research on nuclear physics and chemistry. In 1921 Curie and her daughters traveled to the United States to receive one gram of radium, which had been paid for by donations of American women. This amount of pure radium was not readily available to any other institution, and so the Radium Institute became a leader in the field of radioactivity.

Marie Sklodowska Curie died on July 4, 1934 near Sallanches, France, one year before her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on artificial radioactivity.

1. Marie Curie, Winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
2. The Nobel Prize Internet Archive: Marie Curie
3. Nobel e-Museum: Biography of Marie Curie

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