Marie Curie

If one were to perform a world-wide-web search on the “top ten women scientist of all time”, Marie Curie (also known as Madame Curie) would be in practically all of the search results.

Marie Curie could (and should) be considered as the “Mother” of what was then the new fledgling field of radioactivity. She won two Nobel prizes in science (she was the first woman to win and the only woman to this day that has won two of them, one in physics, and the other in chemistry). She would become the first woman in France to earn a PhD, and her lab would bring in and teach several other women who would go on to have successful careers in physics. It is quite a remarkable accomplishment, especially considering the male dominated field of science at that time.

You can read (a lot) more about Marie Curie in my paper here.