Donna Strickland ’89 (PhD)

Donna Strickland is an experimental physicist and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Strickland is corecipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing chirped pulse amplification, which she accomplished with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the University of Rochester. The goal of the research was to show how high-intensity light changes matter, and how matter affects light in this interaction. CPA, as it is called, revolutionized the field of high-intensity laser physics. Strickland and Mourou published this research in 1985, paving the way to the most intense laser pulses ever created. This work was the basis of Strickland’s doctoral thesis. The research has 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 previously a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and a member of the technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultra-fast 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 a fellow of OSA and SPIE (International Society for Optics and Photonics).

Strickland earned a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester and a bachelor of engineering from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She serves on the Visiting Trustee Committee for the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester.