Semi Secret Sophie🌙✨

11/07/2025

Today, we raise our Geiger counters and toast our pipettes to one of the most brilliant minds in history: Marie Curie, born this day in 1867. 🎉 A physicist. A chemist. A Nobel laureate twice over. A trailblazer in every sense of the word.

She discovered polonium (named after her beloved Poland) and radium, ushered in a whole new era of radioactivity research (a word she coined, by the way), and became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize… and then the only person to win in two different sciences (Physics and Chemistry). Like??? That’s icon behavior. Period.

But let’s be real: Marie Curie wasn’t just smart. She was brave. She worked with substances she didn’t fully understand without gloves or a fume hood and reshaped our understanding of atoms, radiation, and medicine. Her notebooks are still radioactive. That’s how hard she worked.

Why This Hits Home 💖

I still remember learning about Miss Curie back in my early high school chemistry days. She was one of the first women in science I’d ever heard of, and she lit a spark in me. I needed someone to look up to, and she was one of them. She made science feel reachable, powerful, and alive.

I read everything I could about her life and her work. Her story resonated on a personal level too: I’m mostly Italian, second-generation American (my grandparents came over in their teens!), but I’ve also got some Polish roots, and her background stuck with me. It made her feel even more real. Like a woman I could’ve known. Like someone I could become.

✨ Here’s to the Women Who:

• Stay late to re-run controls that didn’t trend right
• Balance motherhood and method validation
• Build SOPs with precision and grace
• Teach. Lead. Discover. Fight.
• Do it all in scrubs, safety glasses, and unapologetic brilliance

As a woman in STEM now myself, I think about how far we’ve come, and how we keep pushing forward, molecule by molecule. Every day I step into the lab, troubleshoot analyzers, write SOPs, or validate some obscure assay, I know I’m walking in footsteps like hers. Marie Curie didn’t just open the door. She ripped it off the hinges so future generations could enter.

We are the legacy.

🧪 Happy Birthday, Marie Curie.
And happy every damn day to every woman in STEM.
We see you. We are you. And we’re not done yet. 💥

xx

Soph