This week’s Wednesday’s Women in STEM Series features the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 55 years. Just yesterday, Dr. Donna Strickland became just the third woman to be awarded this honor.
Strickland was born in Canada and received her PhD in physics at the University of Rochester in New York and is a self-described “laser jock”. Under the guidance of her adviser, Dr. Gerard Mourou, her research focused on laser optics. Together they discovered a technique called Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) that takes a pulse of laser light and makes it stronger. You see, when lasers were first invented scientists could make them stronger and stronger but they eventually stalled out. Strickland’s CPA technique helped create shorter, more intense laser pulses. Applications for these types of intense laser pulses include targeting cancer cells and corrective laser eye surgeries that are performed millions of times each year.
Strickland shares the 2018 award with Mourou, her graduate school adviser, and with Dr. Arthur Ashkin who invented “optical tweezers.” She is currently an associate professor in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
When asked how it felt to be only the third woman to win the Nobel prize for physics, Strickland replied “I thought it might have been more than that. I don’t know what to say.” Some people have criticized that Nobel prizes have a lack of women honorees and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (the governing body for Nobel prizes) said it would be changing it’s nomination guidelines to ensure greater diversity of winners in the future.