Quotes from Donna Strickland

But I don't see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a 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?

My PhD was not fast out of the gate.

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.

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 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.

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.

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'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.

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?

We must give scientists the opportunity through funding and time to pursue curiosity-based, long-term, basic-science research.

The most fun part of my day is when I get to play with my lasers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My parents were definitely the biggest influence in my life.

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.

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.

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.