Donna Strickland

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is understandable that people want to know how it affects them. But as a scientist, I would hope society would be equally interested in fundamental science.”

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

“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.”

“Gérard Mourou, who was my PhD supervisor, dreamed up the idea of increasing laser intensity by orders of magnitude. He did it while he was on a ski trip with his family. He probably shouldn't have been thinking about lasers.”

“I still try to make different types of lasers that other people don't have.”

“But I don't see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist.”

“I feel unbelievably honored to be, you know, with Marie Curie and Goeppert Mayer. It's like, how can I be in the same breath as those three?”

“There's no point in me being something other than me.”

“When I was a first-year in grad school, there were 18 of us in the Ph.D. program, and four of us were women.”

“I have great faith in lasers, but no one's putting one near my eye.”

“Sometimes you just have to be happy you get one chance in life and not worry too much about whether you get two.”

“I mean I certainly tell the Maria Goeppert-Mayer story and I'm happy that life isn't like that. I'm glad there were trailblazers like her and Marie Curie.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What the ultrafast laser does is that because it doesn't have to just cut from the surface, it's only at the intense focal point that it does this damage where the electrons come off the atoms, you could actually put your laser and scan it over your cornea and it would cut underneath that.”

“I got paid the same as my male counterpart grad students and onward.”