In the southwest corner of the University of Utah’s Thatcher Building for Biological and Biophysical Chemistry, The Curie Poster is displayed as a tribute to Utah women in chemistry. The graphic mosaic is made up of small photos arrayed together to constitute an image of Marie Curie, the Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who did pioneering research in radioactivity in the late 1800s and early 1900s and who won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The 1,807 small photos in the poster were collected in February 2013 and depict women who have either studied or taught chemistry at the U. The poster was assembled by Tomi Carr BS’06 MS’13, then an administrative assistant in the Chemistry Department; Dave Titensor BFA’91, art director for U Marketing and Communications; and Marla Kennedy BS’05, then an account executive for Marketing and Communications.
Love this poster! It’s great to see U women recognized for following in Marie Curie’s footsteps. Admirers of Marie Curie may like to look at the Marriott Library’s first edition of Traite de Radioactivite, Paris, 1910 (QC721 C98 1910), held in the Rare Books collection. “Traite” is Curie’s fullest statement on radioactivity, a word she created for a concept that she invented and defined. One year after the publication of “Traite” she became the first scientist to be awarded a second Nobel Prize, for the isolation of the elements radium and polonium.