One year ago, during our visit to CERN, when strolling around the campus with the Polish research team, we stopped by the “Route Marie Curie” sign and Bianka Siwińska asked a simple, but tricky question: “Hey, where is Skłodowska?” Because how can you lose half of a Nobel Prize winner in a place famous for its exact calculations down to minuscule fractions? We asked minister Barbara Nowacka to help in finding the “lost” Skłodowska, and she set the whole formal diplomatic machine at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Poland in Geneva, which produced an official Note Verbale by the Polish state to CERN. The effect? Since November, our wonderful “Doubly Named” Marie has been proudly reigning at the CERN campus, in all the institute’s systems, and the Geneva canton!
Can the street name at the CERN campus become a starting point for a conversation about the visibility of female scientists? Because this is not just an issue of a street sign. This is a question about how the science culture treats women: their surnames, their identity, their history. Who was the first to notice this “small detail” and why they were women? What does it say about sensitivity that allows one to notice not only a mistake, but also the mechanism behind it? And finally: what did the procedure of restoring the street’s full name at one of the main scientific institutions in the world look like – from the first intervention to administrative action, and to the CERN decision?
CERN and “the Polish issue”
CERN is an international territory (one part is located in Switzerland, the other in France), and the institute’s campus functions like a small city, with its own infrastructure, logistics, and topography. Since 1980s CERN street names commemorate important scientists. These include such figures as Einstein, Dirac, Fermi, Rabi, Chandrasekhar. One of the streets was named after the Polish Nobel Prize winner – in the French version, “Route Marie Curie.” When we think of Maria Skłodowska-Curie, we feel intuitively that she is both “ours” and “world’s.” A Polish woman who created French science. A European who restructured the foundations of physics, chemistry, and medicine. A woman who had two surnames not by accident, but by choice.
The world memory of Skłodowska-Curie exists in two orders that are becoming less and less compatible. In the first, the historic and scientific one, her full surname is undisputed. The Pantheon, the Sorbonne, family archives, UNESCO, EU research programmes, scientific biographies – in all those she appears as Maria Skłodowska-Curie, just as she signed her name all her married life. In the other – the names of European streets, schools, institutions – we only see “Marie Curie.” Without “Skłodowska,” without her Polish origin, and thus without the choice she made as a woman, taking on her husband’s surname, but not giving up her family name.
And this is exactly why the story about the change of a street name at CERN – from “Route Marie Curie” to “Route Marie Skłodowska-Curie” – is not, as some might think, “zealous Polonisation” on memory, but restoring its integrity.
Between brand and biography: how women disappear from history
This problem is not limited just to CERN. An analysis of European toponymy (Mapping Diversity, EDJNet) shows that Maria Curie is one of the women most frequently commemorated in street names in Europe: she appears in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, Luxemburg, and Irish cities. In the whole database none of the street names had the form “Skłodowska-Curie.” The same applies to schools and public spaces: Lycée Marie Curie, Marie Curie Gymnasium, Marie Curie Hospice, Avenida Marie Curie. In the US the situation was identical: schools, streets, institutions bear the name of “Marie Curie.” In the UK there is a whole hospice chain named after Marie Curie – no trace of “Skłodowska”! In France, where she lived and worked for over 30 years, the names “Marie Curie” and “Pierre et Marie Curie” dominate. There is one significant exception: Poland, where the full form “Maria Skłodowska-Curie” is the norm, not the exception.
Interesting – in a place where Maria’s memory has a formal, institutional, financial, or scientific dimension, things look different. The European Commission programmes, “Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions,” consistently use the full form of her surname – because this is correct, this is factual, this is consistent with her will and with historic form. This form appears in the Sorbonne documents, the PAN materials, the Nobel Committee records, and her own lab notes. Shortening her surname is not using an “alternative version,” but a mistake in relating her biography.
This discrepancy demonstrates perfectly the mechanism of symbolic marginalisation: the system formally acknowledges the scientist’s full identity, but in everyday collective memory, written on street signs and school names, reduces her to a simplified, easier to pronounce brand. Because “Curie” became a brand: radium, radioactivity, two Nobel Prizes, Curie Institute, scientific heritage. But all her life Maria consciously used her Polish surname. She signed it in letters, in documents, in publications. She did not allow for it to be omitted. Her Polishness was not just a childhood memory or an interesting tidbit in her biography – it was something she wore in public. Against prevalent fashions, against the pressure to assimilate, against the French institutions, which would like to see her as just “Madame Curie.” She herself always was Skłodowska-Curie. And under this very name she is buried in the Pantheon.
Hello, CERN? You lost half a Nobel Prize winner!
Interestingly, in late 2024 and early 2025 this discrepancy was noticed by two groups of women, completely independently of each other: Polish researchers working at CERN and the Perspektywy Women in Tech team. Both, though unaware of the other group’s actions, started to ask identical questions: How is it possible that one of the most important women in history had her surname “shortened” by half? Why an institution always basing its work on hard data and scientific precision lacked basic biographical integrity? And why the women’s surnames are always the first to disappear?
One year ago, during a study visit in CERN by Perspektywy Women in Tech, when strolling around the campus streets with the Polish research team, Bianka Siwińska, our foundation’s CEO, stopped by the sign “Route Marie Curie” and asked: “Hey, where is Skłodowska?”.
That was exactly the question we have been asking for years at Perspektywy, dealing with women’s presence in STEM: why their names, achievements, and full biographies get shortened or simplified so easily? Our role is strengthening the position of supporting women in science and technologies: we support them, we connect environments, we build exchange networks, we show role models, we care for their visibility in public space. If half of the surname of the Polish greatest scientist disappears from the CERN map, it is not a minor detail – it is a signal that this mechanism works even in the scientific circles. This is why such questions are natural and necessary for us, and the activities related to changes are quick and specific.
Information about this discrepancy was relayed to the Ministry of National Education, where Minister Barbara Nowacka – a computer scientist by education, a STEM woman, who has been promoting women’s presence in education and science consistently for years – personally oversaw it. For her, this was not a minor issue, but a matter of historical integrity and symbolic visibility of women in public space. In 2025 the Ministry sent an official Note Verbale No. 722.144.2025.300 to the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Poland with United Nations in Geneva: a formal diplomatic document with a request to modify the street name in accordance with historical truth and official nomenclature.
Meanwhile, about five months ago, the same problem was noticed at CERN by two Polish women scientists, Weronika Głuchowska and Anna Kario. Instead of some more talks about this being “unfortunate, but probably too complicated to change,” they made a short, formal notification at the Diversity & Inclusion Office. In order to attach a suitable explanation, they consulted Barbara Gołębiowska, the head of the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Museum in Warsaw, who sent source materials about the scientist’s signatures and surname.
Everywhere where using a name carries special weight, Maria insisted on using her double surname, emphasising the fact that all her life she felt Polish and had deep ties with her country of origin. This is why she named the first element she discovered, polonium, after Poland, why she supported the Polish science, and initiated the creation of the Radium Institute in Warsaw. The double form of her surname – on Maria’s specific request – appeared on her second Nobel diploma, when she received the individual prise in chemistry. She also used it to sign the Polish edition of the doctoral thesis from 1903, and – especially importantly – also its French edition.
Skłodowska finally returns to CERN!
The Polish researcher’s request found fertile ground at CERN, where the issue initiated by the Ministry of National Education and Minister Barbara Nowacka was already being proceeded. Is it not wonderful and uplifting, that two independent groups of Polish women concurrently demanded reinstatement of Skłodowska’s full identity and that both paths led to the same result? The turning point was in November 2025, when CERN replied to the Note Verbale from the Ministry of National Education with an official letter that states:
“CERN wishes to emphasise that commemorating the scientific achievements and heritage of Maria Skłodowska-Curie with bestowing her name on a street and a conference hall within CERN is the highest honour for the Organisation. CERN confirms that the necessary steps have been initiated to make those names consistent with the wishes of the family and with the binding international standards. As the result of these actions, both the street and the conference hall currently bear the full name: Maria Skłodowska-Curie.
The Organisation wishes to inform that the change has been implemented in all the internal registers, IT systems, and online platforms at CERN, and that the new street sign has been installed. The corresponding Wikipedia entry has also been updated. CERN would like to point out that as the street is located in the part of the CERN territory located in the Swiss Confederacy, the formal change of the street name in the streets registry requires approval by the Geneva Canton State Council. This procedure has been initiated and will come to an end at the suitable time, after the relevant canton authorities finalise their actions.”
This is also moment worthy of commemoration: a huge, international institution, full of procedures, and traditionally rather slow to act, reacted swiftly, clearly, and very good-natured. CERN treated the case seriously and simply did what should be done.
This way two parallel, independent impulses – a grassroots one and an institutional one – led to a correction in one of the world’s main scientific institutions. A small detail? Maybe. But women’s surnames are not just details. The intervention by the Perspektywy Education Foundation, the Ministry of National Education, the CERN researchers and the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Museum was not a sentimental gesture. It was a gesture of caring for the integrity of the history of science. About precision. About women in STEM not losing their names along the way, as very often this is how their erasure starts. With shortening, with simplification, with cutting their names, omitting their identities, with choosing for them the version of history which is “easier”, more media-friendly. And Perspektywy has been working for years on women in science being present with their full voices and full names.
This story is not just about a street name. it is an example of how easily incorrect biographical shortcuts set in, even in science environment, and how important it is both for institutions and research societies to pay attention to precision when describing women. Maria Skłodowska-Curie’s consistency in using her full surname is a historical fact. Restoring this form on the CERN map is thus an act of correction, not reinterpretation.
We would like to give thanks to CERN for its swift reaction and partner-like approach, and to Minister Barbara Nowacka for her help and for giving this matter an official dimension!
