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Elizabeth A.Sackler Center for Feminist Art

Irene Joliot-Curie

b. 1897, Paris; d. 1956, Paris

Irène Joliot-Curie, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, was a nuclear physicist who discovered artificial radioactivity with her husband and research partner Frédéric Joliot-Curie in 1935. Publishing under the name Joliet-Curie, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery. Irène was an atheist, political leftist, and suffragist. After World II, she was appointed head of the Radium Institute in Paris and held this position until she died of leukemia in 1956.