Ștefania Mărăcineanu was a Romanian physicist. She was born on June 18, 1882, and died on August 15, 1944, in Bucharest Romania.
Google celebrates Stefania’s 140-year anniversary after discovering the chemical element Polonium and other fascinating finds.
Ștefania Mărăcineanu cause of death: What happened to Ștefania Mărăcineanu?
Mărăcineanu completed with a physical and chemical science degree in 1910 and started her career as a tutor at the Central School for Girls in Bucharest, Romania. That is where she earned a scholarship from the Romanian Ministry of Science and then decided to pursue graduate research at the Radium Institute in France.
During her research on the half-life of polonium, Mărăcineanu noticed that the half-life seemed dependent on the type of metal it was placed on. This got her to connect links between alpha rays and polonium and the transfer of some atoms of the metal into radioactive isotopes. Her research led to what is most likely the first example of artificial radioactivity.
It was at Sorbonne University in Paris that she ended her Ph.D. program. After working for a few years at the Astronomical Observatory in Meudon, she went back to Romania and built her homeland’s first laboratory for the study of radioactivity.
She dedicated most of her life to researching artificial rain, which included trips to Africa to test her results. She also studied the relationships between earthquakes and rainfall, becoming the first to report that there is a significant increase in radioactivity in the epicenter leading up to an earthquake. Mărăcineanu’s work was recognized by the Academy of Sciences of Romania in 1936.
She went on to work on radioactivity despite its dangers. She died of over-exposure to the element just as Curie or the other radioactivity scientists who fiddled with the element.
