Marguerite Catherine Perey (19 October 1909 – 13 May 1975) was a French physicist and a student of Marie Curie.

In 1962, she was the first woman to be elected to the French Académie des Sciences, an honor denied to her mentor Curie.

[1] Perey was born in 1909 in Villemomble, France, just outside Paris where the Curie's Radium Institute was located.

[3] Perey spent a decade sifting out actinium from all the other components of uranium ore, which Curie then used in her study of the decay of the element.

[3] In 1935, Perey read a paper by American scientists claiming to have discovered a type of radiation called beta particles being emitted by actinium and was skeptical because the reported energy of the beta particles didn't seem to match actinium.

[5][6] (Five elements that were discovered synthetically were later found to exist in nature: technetium, promethium, astatine, neptunium, and plutonium.)

[4] After obtaining her PhD, Perey returned to the Radium Institute as a senior scientist and worked there until 1949.