Donna Strickland

“My parents were definitely the biggest influence in my life.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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've always been treated as an equal.”

“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.”

“I was very good at math and physics. And that's all. I can't do music, art, so there was not a lot of choice for me. I think people should go with their strength and that was my strength.”

“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'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.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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.”

“I mean, so hopefully soon there's enough women and enough people of colour and enough of every group out there that feels that they get the recognition they deserve, and then we don't have to talk about it anymore.”

“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.”

“My PhD was not fast out of the gate.”

“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.”

“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.”