Donna Strickland on being the 1st Canadian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics

Ron Charles, CBC News. Professor Strickland, could you tell us about the call? About the call. I held up the press conference. They did call at 4.58 a.m. My husband posted to the phone. We were still in bed trying to sleep. And they asked for Professor Strickland and he handed to me when they're asking for Professor Strickland because I had already been screaming, what's wrong? And so then they said to me, this is an important call from Sweden. You must stay on the line. Please stay on the line while we transfer the call. And then I stayed on the line for over 15 minutes because I am a ruled follower. But then I said, there's got to be something wrong. So we did hang up. But I discussed this a long time, like how long am I supposed to hang on. And then I kept saying, this would really be a cruel prank if this is just somebody pranking me. And so then I had to get on my email and it said, we can't phone you. Please call us immediately. So then I had to call them. But at least that email did say they were from Swedish Academy. And then I called them and they told me how I would share the prize and that they asked if I would take part in the press conference. And again, I didn't realize that was an optional thing. I was the only one of the three of us that did do that. But anyway, there we are. And sorry, just to follow up, no indication this was coming for work that you did back in 1985? No, the Nobel Prize is a secret thing. There isn't any discussion or anything like that. Nobody asked. It's most awards you get asked to supply your resume, but not for the Nobel, no. Nick Dixon, CTV. So with that in mind, how does that feel then knowing that this is that much more special? It's not that you had to submit, you didn't apply. This is just a reflection of research you've done. All I can say is that I'm overwhelmed, really. I will tell you that over the years, because this is for work done a long, long time ago. Somebody did comment, actually somebody from the Nobel Prize, they think it's the first time ever that someone got it for their very first paper. So over the years when I've met people, they have said, you know, haven't you got that Nobel Prize yet? But I always thought they were kidding with me, right? So I didn't ever think that the CPA would merit that. Yeah, so obviously it's a real thrill and I'm looking forward to talking to Gerard about it. People ask me that a lot too. Out of the 600 emails I've received so far today, Gerard and I have not talked to each other yet about it. Dr. Strickland, last year in a lecture that you did, it was broadcast lecture, you said at one point that women had come a certain amount away in science, because you said you weren't doing Nobel Prize research, but you were at least getting paid to be a scientist. I don't know if you remember making that comment, but I wonder if you made it earlier. It's bad to keep repeating yourself. Okay, it's true. It's true. I mean, this is one of the, and I think some of the undergrads from my class are here. When I get on my soapbox, if I teach E&M, I talk about Maria Gabert Meier. I did cite her in my own thesis. She is the last woman to win a PhD, win a Nobel Prize in physics. And first of all, I will also admit, should I admit? I actually called her he in my thesis, except that one of the people reading the thesis said, shame on you, Donna, and changed it to she, because I knew of the work and did not know that she was a she. And it was after that that I read about her and how she never got a paid job, right? There she is. And actually what I cited her for was she was, and a theorist can do things that experimentalists can't, because they don't have to wait for the laser to be invented. So in 1939, she predicted that an atom could absorb two photons. Nobody had thought of that before. And it was a woman that thought of it and changed how we do that area of science. That's not what she won the Nobel Prize for though, nuclear shell. And yet she just followed her husband from job to job while he became a professor and went up the ranks and moved universities to do that as a chemist. And she would be allowed to teach if she wanted to. And she was allowed to have an office if she wanted to sit there and do some research on her own, but didn't get paid until the fifties. And yet the work I cited her was from 1939. And so obviously women have come a long way. I feel like I get paid the same and I felt like all along I've always been paid the same and treated the same. Can you describe in layman's terms what your research has done for the world and what it means really? No. That's a harder question because people keep asking first about the LASIK surgery, which is still the number one use of the thing. That's not for those of you who've had LASIK surgery. It is a UV laser that V cuts your cornea. It is cutting the cornea flap that this laser has worked on. And that was back in the nineties. So it was just 10 years after we first did CPA. I certainly heard about it just as that was happening and thought it was amazing at the time that I could have done a laser that was definitely being thought of for doing atomic and molecular physics, right? When we were doing it, we just knew that what we were trying to do was get the electric field beyond the electric field that holds the electron to the atom. So that's what we were trying to do. And so that for somebody else could turn it around and just get a good use out of it. That's great. One moment, just press it once, wait for the green light. Was it ever a lifelong goal to win the Nobel prize? No, no, no, no, no. Very, I mean, obviously very few people win the Nobel prize. So why would you want to waste too much time thinking about that? No, I, you know, obviously I'm thrilled to win it. I'm not saying that it isn't an absolute thrill to win it, but, but certainly it never entered my mind that I would. A question for the president. Actually, a lot of people are commenting today that currently professor Strickland is an associate professor. So the suggestion is, does this help her become now a full professor without the paperwork? I guess the Senate has unanimously approved. It's a process. There's a governance process that has to be followed by everybody, including professor Strickland. But I told her that she doesn't have to submit a very long CV while mine will be sufficient. Any questions on the phone? I'm not seeing any come through. So if there are any more from the floor here, can I just jump back in then? You've got students on one side, faculty on the other side, standing ovation here. What is that like? You said this, not many people win Nobel prizes. So what is that like when you walk into a room of your peers and people you're teaching and they're giving you a standing ovation and you know you're a Nobel laureate? Okay. I don't know that it's, yeah, I guess I do know that. I think it's more humbling. I don't know. I find it very hard to walk into a room full of people applauding me. I'd find that hard to do. Questions from students. Sorry, one more then if I can. Lisa Heffner from CHCH. What will this award do for your research and for the school going forward? Hopefully good things. I don't know. I mean, hopefully it helps to be a Nobel Prize winner. I don't doubt that I'll have more students wanting to work with me. The student who's doing his fourth year project with me right now had an email me going, I was going to ask anyway, so sorry that it's the day, you know, that you win the Nobel Prize, but it's not because of that. And I believe him. So hopefully only good things. Hopefully it's not a hindrance. I can't see how it could be. I think we probably ought to recognize that there are many more inquisitive and inquiring minds in the room than our friends from the world's media. Nick, may I just jump in for your last question? I think from, again, just for Professor Strickland, this is now something very new, and I think we're going to have a long talk as to how we're going to plan those things. But as far as the university goes, I think there are a number of very important points here, one of which is the university is very proud, as we showed it at the United Nations in New York City last week, how committed we are to invite more women and girls to come and study STEM disciplines. This is a fantastically strong message. This is the first, she is the first woman in... First, if you put enough adjectives, it can always be the first. I am the first Canadian woman. This is not... We've been working very hard to increase the number of women faculty in STEM disciplines, especially in science, and also students, graduate, undergraduates, so this will be a very, very strong message to everybody that if you work hard, you can win a Nobel Prize. But you can also work hard and not win the Nobel. So as I was saying, with that in mind, if there are any budding Nobel Prize winners in the room who now can ask a question of Waterloo's first ever, first Canadian Nobel... First Canadian woman, you have to have enough adjectives. So please, the floor is open to you, and please don't ask if you can have a pass, because you might get a yes. If you wouldn't mind pressing the button, there you go. Just press it once. Try yelling. There we go. We're good to go. So could you introduce yourself and who you are before you ask your question? Hi, Nathaniel Smith, Department of Chemistry here, but always a fan of physics, and a fan of unrestricted scientific discovery. As a young scientist, people like me try to find our path on how theoretical we should be, should we just follow our curiosities, or how applied should we be? Can you just comment on a young you, as a young scientist, how you navigated that, and if you were pulled more towards just general curiosity, or if you felt pulled towards applied science, and science that can be applied to humanity? More on, specifically, what do you think a scientist's role is to humanity? Is it just to discover for the sake of discovery, or do we have a responsibility as scientists to help the world? Simple question. Thank you. Okay, I have two answers to that question then. The first one is how I navigated it, and I've been told by a reporter that I use the word fun a lot, but I actually think that we all should do what we find fun and what we can do. When my daughter was quite young, she was being asked by her friends about me going out to work rather than staying home, and my answer is the world works best if we all do what we're good at. You know, I had a nanny trained for three years in nanny school in Britain, and she was much better at looking after my children than I was, and I said that that was the case, and she was considered the third parent in the family, and I said I'm much better at tweaking lasers, and so I should be out there in the world tweaking lasers, and that we should all do what we're really good at. So did I ever think, oh, I should be doing something to help humanity? No, I just think if we all do what we're really good at, it just helps the world. That's all. Thank you. Does anyone else in the room want to ask a question of a Nobel Prize winner? Yes, we have one in the back there. Is this working? Donna, this isn't a question, but you can see your whole department is here. Congratulations. We are so proud of you. Thank you. I think everybody here echoes that sentiment and around our campus. Any students, undergraduate or graduate students, want to ask Professor Strickland a question? Don't be shy. Yes, we've got one. No, no, you're just waving. He was in my class. That's all he's letting me know. Yes, we have... Oh, yes, a comment to you. Go ahead. Hi, Donna. My name is Christopher Zaworski. I'm a graduate student in the physics department. I'm just wondering, while you were doing your research, did you have any indication that this would lead to a Nobel Prize at all while you were doing it? While I was doing my PhD research? Okay, no. But I do know that my supervisor, Gerard, knew it would be very big. Okay, but this is how unready we were. The very first laser, the paper that's gotten me the Nobel Prize, made a gigawatt of power, right? So it was a millijoule in a picosecond. And he said, Donna, when you go give your very first talk ever at a conference, he goes, Donna, when you go, you must say it's the way to make... What is 10 to the 15th? I don't know. We have a library here. What's the word for 10 to the 15th? You must know. And I said, I don't know. And so we ran around the library the night before I went to the conference to look up the word petawatt, okay? So that's six orders of magnitude beyond what I did. And as a young grad student, I was telling him, you want me to go in front of all the laser people and say, oh, you know, we've done this, but this is really the way to go for six orders of magnitude. I have to say, they have built five petawatt lasers. They're up to five petawatts now. It took 10 years to get to the first petawatt. He was right. We certainly knew it was the way to go. It was a money issue that we couldn't go there because it takes a great big giant laser, as you can imagine. So we knew it would be big. But does that mean that you thought Nobel Prize now? Well, I don't know. If you asked Gerard, it might be a different story. Maybe he knew, but I don't know. We will throw it. Oh, Ron. Just one, Ron Charles again from CBC. Once again, could you explain once again the reason you and Dr. Moreau, Professor Moreau, came up with this method for expanding the capacity of lasers? All right. So Gerard was already a leading person in the world of ultrafast lasers, and he had a lot of short pulse laser systems. When I was a fairly new graduate student, he had read a theoretical paper on how to get to what was called higher harmonics that would need an intense laser. And so he just gave me the paper that day and said, let's think about how we can make an intense laser to make this work. So I took a long time to get that result. We tried different ways first that did not work. And then over the course of four years, other people were out there trying to do pulse compression, and it just sort of all fit together as to how come doing the CPA technique would be like I scrapped what I did and switched to CPA because it would be the way to make intense lasers. So in reality, it was a solution to a problem that existed in terms of lasers not being able to whoa. Only I'm in the spotlight, sorry. In terms of lasers not being able to become powerful enough. I did this work from 84 to 85, and at the time you could either have short pulse lasers or you could have high energy lasers. You could not have both because you would blow up the laser if you put the peak power in the laser. So yes, now, of course, after we published it, and after people came to the lab, they said, well, you know, the radar people did this back in World War II. Okay, so, you know, we always keep reinventing the wheel. We have a question from our friends on the phone. Yvonne Caron from AFP asks, not my question, I must hasten to add, how do you assess the situation of funding in your field? And do you think there is enough funding for basic physics research? There's never enough funding for basic research. So that would be the first answer. In my own field, certainly when I came back to Canada 20 years ago, Nortel and JDS were flying big. And so when I came back, I really, you know, had a pretty easy time compared to my colleagues. Money was flowing my way because I did optics. And then unfortunately, Nortel and JDS are not the giants. Well, Nortel doesn't even exist anymore. And so things change for those of us that studied optics. So obviously, I would love those days to come back. I'm waiting for another Nortel any day now to help us out. But yeah, I think all governments should support scientists. I think the president of the University of Waterloo has stated on many occasions how badly he hopes that we are the institution that gives birth to that next billion dollar Canadian company. I think with that, unless there are questions from our students in the room. Yes, we do. Okay, one more. Go ahead. Press the button, please. Yeah, is it pressed? Do you have any advice to young female scientists? And maybe for all the difficulties that they face, any advice that you want to share? Yeah, I do. I do get asked that a lot. I will tell you that in my own... I think I went through with the blinders on. I don't think I purposely put the blinders on. I just look that way. If I want something, I just see what I want. And if people say no, I think they're wrong. So I think that's good advice. If somebody else says something that you don't believe in, just think they're wrong and you're right and keep going. Because that's pretty much the way I always think.