Join us to celebrate a new chapter for WCT in Kitchener-Waterloo featuring special guest speaker Dr. Donna Strickland.
Learn more about your community chapter of WCT while networking with other local professional women. Special guest speaker Dr. Donna Strickland, Canadian optical physicist and pioneer in the field of pulsed lasers and professor at the University of Waterloo, will share her personal journey from her early career to receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics to what is next.
About Donna Strickland
Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of
Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped
pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this
Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of
Rochester in New York state. Together they paved the way toward the most intense laser
pulses ever created. The research has several applications today in industry and medicine —
including the cutting of a patient’s cornea in laser eye surgery, and the machining of small glass
parts for use in cell phones.
Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton
University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group
develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. She is a recipient of a
Sloan Research Fellowship, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award and a Cottrell Scholar
Award. She served as the president of the Optical Society (OSA) in 2013 and is an OSA Fellow.
Strickland earned a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester and a B.Eng. from McMaster
University.