The scientist I admire most is Marie Curie. I first read about her in a children's encyclopedia when I was about nine, and later, when I was studying chemistry at secondary school in Kraków, our teacher spent a whole lesson on her because she was born in Poland, in Warsaw.
What she achieved is remarkable even now. Together with her husband, Pierre, she discovered two new elements, polonium and radium, and she named polonium after her home country. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she later won a second one in a different science, which no one else has done. During the First World War she also helped set up mobile X-ray units so that doctors near the front line could find bullets and broken bones.
I admire her for more than the prizes, though. When she was young, women in Poland weren't allowed into university, so she studied at a secret, unofficial school and then worked as a governess for years to save money to study in Paris. That kind of persistence really impresses me. I also respect that she didn't try to get rich from her discoveries; she chose not to patent the process for isolating radium so that other researchers could use it.
On a personal level, she's part of the reason I'm now training to be a lab technician. Whenever an experiment fails for the third or fourth time, I remind myself that she spent years processing tonnes of material in a leaky shed just to get a tiny amount of radium. It makes my problems seem quite small.