Nobel Prize winner Professor Donna Strickland at her home in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, on October 2, 2018. (Peter Power/Reuters)

Nobel Prize winner now a full professor at Waterloo

Nobel Prize winner Professor Donna Strickland is finally a full professor at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario.

Professor Strickland shared the illustrious honour this year for outstanding work in Physics, with Professor Gérard Mourou from France.

‘Oh my God. It’s like working around a Christmas tree all the time. How fabulous is that?’

Their work created groundbreaking tools from beams of light that now have a number of applications today in industry and medicine, from laser eye surgery to laser printers.

Arthur Ashkin of the United States, also won the prize for a separate invention.

Professor Strickland is the first Canadian woman to win a Nobel prize in physics and just the third woman ever to win one. 

Strickland was an associate professor of physics and astronomy and former president of the Optical Society.

The first Canadian woman to win a Nobel prize

In an interview with Beth Gallagher of the U of W, Professor Strickland said, “I have tremendous confidence in myself. . . I just go and do what I want to do.”

Nobel Prize Laureate Professor Donna Strickland wearing laser goggles in a 2011 photo. Courtesy of U of Waterloo.

Donna Strickland also shared her memory of first discovering Professor Morou’s laser lab, when she arrived as a graduate student at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, New York.

“We walked into the lab and it was full of these red and green lasers. I just said, ‘Oh my God. It’s like working around a Christmas tree all the time. How fabulous is that?’ “It was just sort of a gut reaction.”

Today the University of Waterloo confirmed that Strickland was promoted to full professor.

“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,” she said.

She also now has her own entry on Wikipedia.

(With files from the University of Waterloo, CBC, and CP)

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