Curie, Marie

[person]

French-Polish physicist and chemist born in Warsaw (1867–1934). Curie was the Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne. Working with her husband, Pierre Curie, and inspired by Becquerel's discovery of radiation, Curie isolated and named the element polonium. She also developed techniques for isolating radium from radioactive residues in order to study its properties. Curie was awarded, with Pierre, half a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, for their study of Becquerel radiation. After her husband's death in 1906, she succeeded him as Professor of General Physics, and was the first woman to hold the post. In 1911, she was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in radioactivity.