Canadian professor collects her Nobel

A Canadian scientist who became one of just three women to win the Nobel Prize for Physics received her award at a ceremony in Sweden on Monday as supporters at her Ontario university cheered her on from halfway across the world.

Donna Strickland, a professor at the University of Waterloo, was recognized for being half of the team to discover Chirped Pulse Amplification, a technique that underpins today’s shortpulse, high-intensity lasers, crucial to corrective eye surgery.

The 59-year-old from Guelph, Ont., made the discovery in the 1980s, while completing her PHD at the University of Rochester in New York, and shares half of the Us$1.01-million prize with her doctoral adviser, French physicist Gérard Mourou. The other half of the prize went to Arthur Ashkin of the U.S., who was the third winner of the award.

Strickland, whose win was announced in early October, received her prize from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm.

Back in Canada, faculty, staff and students gathered at the University of Waterloo to watch a live broadcast of the proceedings, bursting into cheers and applause as a smiling Strickland walked across a stage to pick up her award.

“Universities around the world would dream of receiving a Nobel Prize amongst their professoriate,” said university spokesman Matthew Grant. “This is a huge moment for our Nobel prize winner, our campus and for Canada as a whole.”

Strickland’s win ended a 55-year-long drought for female physicists at the Nobels. She joins the ranks of Marie Curie, the first woman to claim the honour in 1903, and 1963 winner Maria Goeppert-mayer.

Meghan Koo, a medical physics student at the University of Waterloo, said on Twitter that watching Strickland receive her Nobel prize made her proud to be a female physics student.

Science Minister Kirsty Duncan said Strickland’s win marked “a momentous day” for women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The impact of Strickland’s research was highlighted at Monday’s ceremony by a Nobel official who pointed out creating more powerful lasers had stalled by the mid1980s. The problem, he said, was that the intensity of the lasers destroyed the material that was designed to amplify it. Strickland and Mourou figured out how to bypass that problem by creating laser pulses and then compressing those pulses.

Donna Strickland