Maria Sklodowska-Curie (1867-1934) was a Polish-born French physicist who pioneered the study of radioactivity.
She moved to Paris to pursue her education where she met and married Pierre Curie, a physicist, and together they discovered two new radioactive elements: polonium which was named after Marie's native country and radium from the Latin word for "ray".
She became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 along with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, for their work in radiation phenomena. She became the first woman professor of physics at the Sorbonne and she won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911.
Curie applied her knowledge of radioactivity to medicine and developed mobile x-ray units to help wounded soldiers during WWI. In 1920 her health started to fail and she died 14 years later from aplastic anemia likely caused by radiation due her exposure to radiography.
