Marie Skłodowska Curie born1867, Warsaw, Poland
Died: 1934, Sancellemoz is a sanatorium in the town of Passy, in Haute-Savoie, eastern France.
She was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, Physics, and Chemistry and the first person and only woman to win the Nobel prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields.
Education: University of Paris (1903), University of Paris (1894), University of Paris (1891–1893), Flying University
She was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. She studied at Warsaw’s clandestine Flying University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and physicist Henri Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Her achievements included the development of the theory of radioactivity (a term that she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium, and radium. Under her direction, the world’s first studies into the treatment of neoplasms were conducted using radioactive isotopes. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw, which remain major centers of medical research today. During World War I, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals.
While a French citizen, Marie Skłodowska Curie, who used both surnames, never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to Poland. She named the first chemical element she discovered polonium, after her native country.
Marie Curie died in 1934, aged 66, at a sanatorium in Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie), France, of aplastic anemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research and in the course of her radio logical work at field hospitals during World War I.
Quotes
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less”.
“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas”.
“I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.”
Beaugrand's Blog 