A university professor becomes the first Canadian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for physics at an awards ceremony in Sweden today.
Donna Strickland,a professor at Ontario’s University of Waterloo, is receiving the prestigious prize from the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm Monday.
Strickland is the third woman in the history of the Nobel Prize to be recognized for her efforts in the field of physics, joining Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 and Marie Curie in 1903.
The awarding of the prize to Strickland has ended a 55-year-long drought for female physicists being recognized by the prize committee.
"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.
"We should never lose the fact that we are moving forward. We are always marching forward."
Strickland was told of the honour in an early morning phone call from the academy in October.
She received the prize for being half of the team to discover Chirped Pulse Amplification in the 1980s, a technique that underpins short-pulse, high-intensity lasers that are now used in corrective laser eye surgery, among other broad industrial and medical applications. Click to learn more about CPA.
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.
The other half of the prize will go to Arthur Ashkin of the United States, who was the third winner of the award.
She said her personal triumph doubles as a sign of progress for her male-dominated industry.
"If somebody else thinks something that you don't believe in, just think they're wrong and you're right and keep going," Strickland said. "That's pretty much the way I always think."
Strickland’s ‘name twin’ in nearby Cambridge, ON, was bombarded with emails and social media messages with well wishes and requests for interviews, mistaking her for the professor. The pair met for coffee after the Nobel Prize winner reached out to her on Facebook.
The Nobel prize-giving ceremony will be broadcast live starting at 10:30 a.m. ET
