Marie Skłodowska-Curie, c mid-20th century

Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie, known as Marie Skłodowska-Curie, and Marie Curie, born 1867 and died 1934. A polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist, she pioneered research on radioactivity, becoming the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. She was also the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice, and only person so far to win the Nobel Prize in two different fields. She studied in Warsaw and Paris. She married her husband Pierre Curie in 1895, and together they won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. She coined the term 'radioactivity'. Her husband died in cart accident in 1906. Skłodowska-Curie won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovery of the elements polonium and radium, as well as creating techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes. The Curie Institute of Paris was founded by her in 1920, and the Curie Institute in Warsaw in 1932. During WWI, she invented method for mobile radiography units to provide X-rays. Although she became a naturalised French citizen, she did not forget her Polish identity, and went by both surnames, even naming Polonium after her home country. She died in 1934, aged 66, of aplastic anaemia, likely caused by her exposure to radiation through her work. Over the course of her life, she received numerous scientific achievement awards, including the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh in 1931. She was the first woman to win this award since it began in 1878. Although two further women recipients would share the prize with a man in Gladys Rowena Henry Dick in 1933, and Eleanor J Zaimis in 1956, another woman would not solely be awarded the prize until 2018. The unit for radioactivity, the Curie, Ci, is named after her and her husband. The element curium is also named in her and her husbands honour.