Marie Curie left Poland for Paris because women weren't permitted to attend university in her home country at the time. She arrived with barely enough money to live on, surviving winters in an unheated attic room, sometimes fainting from hunger during her studies, determined to earn a physics degree that most institutions assumed a woman couldn't handle.
Working alongside her husband Pierre, she chose to research a strange, barely understood phenomenon called radioactivity — a term she herself coined — using a leaking, poorly insulated shed as her laboratory because the university wouldn't give her proper facilities. She spent years physically processing tons of a mineral called pitchblende by hand to isolate two new elements: polonium, named after her homeland, and radium.
In 1903, she became the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize, sharing the Physics prize with Pierre. After Pierre's sudden death in 1906, rather than step back, she took over his teaching position at the Sorbonne — becoming its first female professor — and kept working. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, becoming the first person of either gender to win in two different scientific fields.
She died in 1934 from illness almost certainly caused by decades of unprotected exposure to the very radioactive materials she'd pioneered the study of — her notebooks are still considered too radioactive to handle safely without protective equipment today, a quiet testament to just how far she pushed the work.