Early Life
Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire, she moved to Paris in 1891 to study at the Sorbonne, where she met Pierre Curie, whom she married in 1895.
Career
With Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel she shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on radioactivity, and she won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering polonium and radium. During World War I she developed mobile X-ray units to help treat wounded soldiers.
Legacy
Curie became the first woman to hold a professorship at the University of Paris and helped found the Radium Institutes in Paris and Warsaw. She died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, likely caused by long exposure to radiation, and in 1995 became the first woman entombed in the Panthéon in Paris on her own merits.
Sources and further reading
Last updated: 2026-09-24