Marie Curie

Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw, Poland, then ruled by Russia, the youngest of five children of two teachers. Women could not attend university in Poland, so she studied secretly and worked as a governess to help pay for her sister's medical studies in Paris. In 1891 she followed her to Paris, studied physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne, and in 1895 married the physicist Pierre Curie. Following Henri Becquerel's discovery of rays from uranium, she studied these rays, named the effect radioactivity, and with Pierre discovered two new elements, polonium, named for Poland, and radium, after years of processing tons of ore in a leaky shed. In 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Becquerel. Pierre was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in 1906, and she took over his professorship, becoming the first woman professor at the Sorbonne. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. During the First World War she set up mobile X-ray units to help treat wounded soldiers. She died in 1934 of an illness caused by radiation exposure.

Faith: Raised Catholic by her mother; after the deaths of her mother and sister she became agnostic. Source: Wikipedia