1867–1934

Marie Skłodowska-Curie and the programme named after her

A Pole who left for Paris because the university at home would not take women, and who returned to history with two Nobel Prizes and a new word — radioactivity. Europe named after her the programme that since 1996 has paid researchers to go somewhere else and learn something new.

The life

1. 1867Maria Skłodowska is born in Warsaw, to a family of teachers.
2. 1891She leaves for Paris and studies at the Sorbonne — an education closed to women at home.
3. 1898She coins the word “radioactivity” and, with Pierre Curie, discovers polonium, named after Poland, and radium.
4. 1903Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel.
5. 1906She becomes the first woman to teach at a French university.
6. 1911Nobel Prize in Chemistry — the only person awarded in two different natural sciences.
7. 1914–1918She designs mobile X-ray units for the front; over a million wounded are examined with them.
8. 1934She dies of aplastic anaemia, caused by years of work with radiation.

The programme, 1996–2026

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions are the part of the European framework programme that funds people rather than equipment: doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows and exchanges between universities, institutes and companies. The figures below are for the programme as a whole.

150,000+

researchers supported worldwide

180+

nationalities, in more than 130 countries

30,000+

organisations that hosted them

€6.6bn

budget under Horizon Europe (2021–2027)

18,000+

projects funded since 2014 alone

40–45%

of funded researchers are women

Figures from the European Commission, as summarised by BG Science.

And what is in this atlas

This page tells the programme's story in its own figures. The atlas beside it is something else: 42,441 individual projects from 1996 to 2027, 21,792 organisations in 167 countries — taken from the open data of CORDIS, one project at a time. 176 of them have a Bulgarian participant.

More about Marie Skłodowska-Curie on BG Science

• 30 years of Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1996–2026)Where the figures on this page come from: reach, budgets, fields.
• Marie Curie: facts and biographyThe whole life in order — from Warsaw to the Radium Institute.
• 10 curious facts about Marie CurieThe letter from Einstein, the X-ray vans, her notebooks.
• Marie Curie — the first lady of physicsOn the barriers facing women in science, and how she passed them.

These four articles are in Bulgarian.