The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics to three physicists for their work on lasers. While one half of the award goes to Arthur Ashkin, who invented optical tweezers, the other half is shared between Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland.
YES! FIRST WOMAN IN 55 YEARS
In last 55 years, this is the first time that a woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics, bringing the total number of female recipients of the prize to three. She is the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel in physics and one of only three women in history, including Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963.
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Strickland who shares her award with Mourou, has been awarded for the method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses which can be used to cut or drill very precise holes in material, including living tissue.
CAREER AS PHYSICIST
Strickland, who was born in Guelph, conducted her award-winning research while still at PhD student in 1985 at the University of Rochester in New York. She graduated with a Bachelors in Engineering Physics from McMaster University and obtained her PhD in Physics (optics) at the University of Rochester in 1989.
Her pioneering work on the “Compression of amplified chirped optical pulses” was published in 1985 and led to the development of the field of high intensity, ultrashort pulses of light beams. Strickland’s recent work has focused on pushing the boundaries of ultrafast optical science to new wavelength ranges such as the mid-infrared and the ultraviolet, using techniques such as two-color or multi-frequency techniques, as well as Raman Generation.
At present, Strickland serves as an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, where she leads an ultrafast laser group that develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations.
In the past, Strickland has served as the vice-president (2011) and the president (2013) of the Optical Society. She has also been a topical editor of Optics Letters journal from 2004 to 2010.
