Donna Strickland

The inaugural Rev. Joseph Carrier, C.S.C., Science Medal was presented in November to Donna Strickland, Ph.D., who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2018.

Strickland, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, was awarded the Nobel Prize for her part in inventing a technique called chirped pulse amplification, which has allowed doctors to perform corrective eye surgery and manufacturers to cut glass for cellphones. She shared the 2018 prize with her doctoral adviser, Gérard Mourou, for work they published in 1985 while she was at the University of Rochester in New York.

“Professor Strickland has changed modern science and helped to revolutionize laser physics,” Schnell said. “Thanks to her discoveries, laser technology allows humanity to tackle new and challenging scientific and technological problems. We are now able to explore complex interactions between light and matter, accelerate atomic particles or develop new sources of radiation to treat cancers. We are very pleased that she has agreed to accept our inaugural Carrier Science Medal and look forward to her lecture.”

Strickland was the third woman, after Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963, to win the Nobel Prize in physics. Andrea Ghez later won the prize in 2020.

Strickland’s Nobel-winning research was outlined in her first-ever scientific paper. She began work at the University of Waterloo in 1997 after working as a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, as a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and as a member of the technical staff at Princeton University.

She accepted the award and presented a lecture on November 3, 2022, at the University of Notre Dame in the Jordan Hall of Science.

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