Which Nobel Prize winner was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize?

Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.

She won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, for research into the phenomena of radiation. Curie was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw and later worked in France, where she became a pioneering scientist in physics and chemistry.

Curie received a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry, for discovering the elements polonium and radium and for studying radium’s nature and compounds. She remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields.

Her achievements were especially significant in an era when women faced major barriers in higher education and scientific institutions. During the First World War, she also helped develop mobile X-ray units for medical treatment near battlefields. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie later won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, making the family an unusual part of Nobel history.