But I don't see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist.
Donna Strickland
The most fun part of my day is when I get to play with my lasers.
We must give scientists the opportunity through funding and time to pursue curiosity-based, long-term, basic-science research.
I mean, so hopefully soon there's enough women and enough people of colour and enough of every group out there that feels that they get the recognition they deserve, and then we don't have to talk about it anymore.
There's no point in me being something other than me.
I just think white light generation is just one of these remarkable things to see, and actually, you know, one colour of light goes in to just water or any clear anything and out comes all the colours of the rainbow when the pulses are short and intense enough.
It is understandable that people want to know how it affects them. But as a scientist, I would hope society would be equally interested in fundamental science.
I've now been encouraged by many people to apply and so I did apply and I have now been made, full professor. I'm happy about that.
Because the high-intensity pulses are short, the laser only damages the area where it's applied. The result is precise, clean cuts that are ideal for transparent materials.
My PhD was not fast out of the gate.
We proved that we could increase laser intensity by orders of magnitude. In fact, CPA led to the most intense laser pulses ever recorded. Our findings changed the world's understanding of how atoms interact with high-intensity light.
As for me, I want to have fun while I'm working. Now not everyone thinks physics is fun, but I do. I think experimental physics is especially fun, because not only do you get to solve puzzles about the universe or on Earth, there are really cool toys in the lab.
I hadn't looked at all the Nobel Prizes and thought, my goodness, there's no women. So it was a little bit surprising to me.
If somebody else thinks something that you don't believe in, just think they're wrong and you're right and keep going. That's pretty much the way I always think.
We read to our kids at bedtime because we want to have literacy, but what are we doing to make sure kids are equally fascinated by science?
Sometimes you just have to be happy you get one chance in life and not worry too much about whether you get two.
I was a very shy kid and both my best friend and my sister went to Waterloo, and I just thought no I can't, I can't go there because I'll just hang on to them and no one will even know who the heck I am and that's no way to go through life.
I think we've been pushing for a lot of years and I do feel like women's lib was talked about a lot in the 70s and I certainly always felt that, you know, as a woman, I could do whatever the heck I wanted.
I feel that women should start to get to be recognized more because for some reason not all men want to recognize us or not all people, but I think that's a minority. I think the majority of people are ready.
I mean I certainly tell the Maria Goeppert-Mayer story and I'm happy that life isn't like that. I'm glad there were trailblazers like her and Marie Curie.
For her PhD, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a theoretical physicist, came up with the idea of multi-photon physics. That means an atom absorbs two or more photons simultaneously.
My PhD project was actually doing something that required a high-intensity laser. It was supposed to work in a way that many, many photons of light would interact with an atom all at the same time.
Marie Curie is in a class all her own as the first female winner and still the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different science categories. An astounding scientist.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer, you know, she didn't even get paid to be a scientist. And yet, she was doing Nobel Prize-winning work. How ridiculous is that?
I have great faith in lasers, but no one's putting one near my eye.
What the ultrafast laser does is that because it doesn't have to just cut from the surface, it's only at the intense focal point that it does this damage where the electrons come off the atoms, you could actually put your laser and scan it over your cornea and it would cut underneath that.
Obviously, over the history of certainly the last 300 years, it was that men went out and worked, and women stayed home. Yes okay, that's the way it was. But certainly it isn't that women weren't able to do it.
I think for a long time we were just 10 percent women in physics, and so obviously people can see things in the way they've always been seen.
When I was a first-year in grad school, there were 18 of us in the Ph.D. program, and four of us were women.
In high school, I was very good in math and physics. I wasn't good at much of anything else. Some people are good at a lot of things. I don't know how they choose what to do.
I feel unbelievably honored to be, you know, with Marie Curie and Goeppert Mayer. It's like, how can I be in the same breath as those three?
Gérard Mourou, who was my PhD supervisor, dreamed up the idea of increasing laser intensity by orders of magnitude. He did it while he was on a ski trip with his family. He probably shouldn't have been thinking about lasers.
I've always been treated as an equal.
I got paid the same as my male counterpart grad students and onward.
I was very good at math and physics. And that's all. I can't do music, art, so there was not a lot of choice for me. I think people should go with their strength and that was my strength.
McMaster had an engineering physics program and... one of the parts of it was lasers and electro-optics and I just said, 'Now doesn't that sound cool. I just got to do that.'
I still try to make different types of lasers that other people don't have.
My parents were definitely the biggest influence in my life.
