Nobel prize-winning couples: Abhijit Banerjee-Esther Duflo the sixth

Married couples where both partners have been awarded the Nobel Prize are not very common in the history of the Nobel Prize. This year the rare phenomena occurred where the Nobel Prize Economics was announced to Abhijit Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” The Nobel Prize for Economics is officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences which is awarded in memory of Alfred Nobel.  

In the History of the Nobel Prize, it has even been a more rare situation where the couple has been awarded the Nobel Prize in the same category.

READ | Nobel Economics Prize 2019: Abhijit Banerjee, wife Duflo, & Kremer win

Here is the list of couples who have won the Nobel Prize:

1. Gerty and Carl Cori

Gerty and Carl studied together at the medical school, graduated, married, and were immigrants who moved from Vienna to Buffalo, after sensing the rise in anti-Semitism. In the US, they collaborated in most of their research work on how hormones and enzymes cooperate. After 30 years of teamwork, the couple was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for their research on glycogen and glucose metabolism.  

2. Marie and Pierre Curie

Marie and Pierre Curie are both recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics. The prize was awarded to them in 1903. While Madam Curie lived to see such a great victory, Sir. Pierre Curi received the honour post his death. The couple got married in 1895. In the same year, Henri Becquerel discovered that minerals containing uranium emitted strong radiation. Marie became interested in these “uranium rays”, and her research resulted in the idea of a new element. This made Pierre put his research aside and get deeply involved in Marie’s project, and in 1898, they discovered two new elements – polonium and radium.

READ | Polish city declares free transport for readers of Nobel laureate

3. Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot

Irène was the eldest daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie. Following her parents' legacy, she eventually started working at their Radium Institute. In 1924, Frédéric Joliot came to the institute to work as an assistant to Marie Curie. Back then, it was Irène who taught him the techniques around the research on radioactivity. The two got married in 1926. Irène and Frédéric researched both individually and together, in particular on the projection of nuclei, which was an essential step in the discovery of the neutron and the positron. The couple's greatest discovery was artificial radioactivity, for which they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in the year 1935.

4. Alva and Gunnar Myrdal 

Alva and Gunnar Myrdal were leading social scientists of the 1930s. The couple were deeply interested and invested in family politics and welfare issues. They are so far the only wife/husband team to acquire two awards in different disciplines. Gunnar had already been jointly awarded the 1974 Prize in Economic Sciences on research on the interrelations between economic, social and political processes, while Alva was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 for her work countering nuclear proliferation.

5. May-Britt and Edvard Moser

Married couples where both partners have been awarded the Nobel Prize are not very common in the history of the Nobel Prize. But in 2014 it happened again – when May-Britt and – then-husband – Edvard Moser were awarded the Medicine Prize for their discovery of our “inner GPS”. In this podcast, Edvard Moser talks about their long collaboration and the importance of their different personalities.

6. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

2018-19 Nobel Prize winners, Abhijit Banerjee and his wife Esther Duflo, are both economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, Esther Duflo is the Co-Founder and Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. 

READ | Esther Duflo becomes youngest-ever Nobel Economics Prize winner

READ | Couple Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo share Nobel Economics Prize

(With inputs from nobelprize.org)