Ontario woman wins for Physics
WATERLOO, Ont. A Canadian scientist who became only the third woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics said her personal triumph doubles as a sign of progress for her male-dominated industry.
Donna Strickland, associate professor at Ontario’s University of Waterloo, was honoured on Tuesday for being half of the team to discover Chirped Pulse Amplification, a technique that underpins today’s short-pulse, highintensity lasers.
The 59-year-old Guelph, Ont., native made the discovery while completing her PhD at the University of Rochester in New York and will share half of the US$1.01-million prize with her doctoral adviser, French physicist Gerard Mourou. Arthur Ashkin of the United States was the third winner of the 2018 physics prize.
Strickland’s victory not only cemented her own place in Nobel history, but ended a 55-year-long drought for female physicists being recognized by the prize committee. She joins the ranks of Marie Curie, the first woman to claim the honour in 1903, and 1963 winner Maria Goeppert-Mayer.
Strickland said reflecting on Goeppert-Mayer’s career shows how far the scientific field has come in terms of gender parity despite the fact that women still make up only a quarter of attendees at major conferences.
Goeppert-Mayer, whose work was cited in Strickland’s own award-winning efforts, went largely unpaid throughout her career.
"It’s true that a woman hasn’t been given the Nobel Prize since then, but I think things are better for women than they have been,” Strickland told the Canadian Press in an interview. “We should never lose the fact that we are moving forward. We are always marching forward.”
Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences, which chose the winners, described Strickland and Mourou’s work as “revolutionary.”
The Chirped Pulse Amplification Technique, first laid out in a 1985 article, was described by the academy as “generating high-intensity, ultrashort optical pulses,” which have become a critical part of corrective eye surgeries amongst other uses.
Strickland said she and Mourou were well aware that they were onto something in 1982 when they began researching ways to allow lasers to perform high-intensity, ultrashort pulses that would not damage the equipment.
When the pair refined the technique, Strickland recalled Mourou’s advice to talk up their accomplishment and tell their peers that the gigawatt laser they had developed would lay the groundwork for devices a million times more powerful down the road.
“I knew he was right, it just seemed very bombastic for me to say it in front of the experts of the world,” she said. “I found that hard.”
Mourou’s prediction came to pass a mere decade later, she said, adding Chirped Pulse Amplification now has broad applications.