Google celebrates Romanian physicist Stefania Maracineanu’s 140th birth anniversary with this doodle

Google Doodle today honoured Romanian physicist Stefania Maracineanu, a pioneering woman in the discovery and research of radioactivity. Maracineanu was known for her “knowledge of precise electrometric measurements”. In 1910, she graduated with a physical and chemical science degree and started her career as a teacher at the Central School for Girls in Bucharest. She received a scholarship from the Romanian Ministry of Science during this time but decided to pursue graduate research at the Radium Institute in Paris. Maracineanu then taught at high schools in different Romanian cities. She even travelled to Paris for her further study after the first World War. In 1919, she studied radioactivity with physicist  Marie Curie at Sorbonne. She pursued her research work with Curie at the Radium Institute until 1926, from when she completed her Ph.D. In her research on the half-life of polonium, Maracineanu discovered that the half-life seemed dependent on the type of metal that it was placed on. This led her to research if the alpha rays from the polonium transferred some atoms of the metal into radioactive isotopes. This gave birth to the concept of artificial radioactivity. Maracineanu then got into the Sorbonne University in Paris to complete her Ph.D. in physics. She worked for four years at the Astronomical Observatory in Meudon after which she returned to Romania where she founded her homeland’s first laboratory for the study of radioactivity. Maracineanu also performed experiments to investigate the connection between radioactivity and rainfall, as well as the link between rainfall and earthquakes. In 1935, Irene Currie, daughter of Marie Curie, and her husband were honoured with a joint Nobel prize for the discovery of artificial radioactivity. Maracineanu did not participate in the contest for the Nobel prize but asked for recognition for her role in the discovery. Her work was recognised by the Academy of Sciences of Romania in the year 1936 where she was chosen to serve as a Director of research, but she never received global recognition.