Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry was Marie Curie. She received the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the elements polonium and radium, isolating radium, and studying its properties.

Curie had already shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for research into radioactivity. Her Chemistry award therefore made her the first person—and remains one of the very few people—to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific categories.

Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, she later worked in Paris, where she and Pierre Curie investigated pitchblende. Their work showed that the ore contained highly radioactive substances not yet known to science. They named polonium after her homeland, Poland.

A frequent confusion involves Irène Joliot-Curie, Marie's daughter, who became the second woman to win the Chemistry prize, in 1935. Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin were major scientists, but neither won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.