The Australian Academy of Science is delighted to welcome Professor Donna Strickland FAA FRS Nobel Laureate to the Shine Dome during her tour of Australia for the International Year of Quantum.
Professor Strickland will be formally admitted as a Fellow of the Academy, followed by a public lecture about her remarkable work leading to her Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018.
The Academy thanks the Australian Institute of Physics, the Department of Defence and the Canadian High Commission for their support of this event and others across Australia. For more information about other events in Australia during Professor Strickland’s visit, see the Quantum2025 website.
Date: Thursday 10 July 2025
Time: 5.30pm – 7.00pm AEST, followed by refreshments
Venue: Shine Dome Canberra, and livestream
Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Professor Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester in New York state. Together they paved the way toward the most intense laser pulses ever created.
Professor Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations.
Professor Strickland was named a Companion of the Order of Canada. 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, the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society. She is an honorary fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering as well as the Institute of Physics, and an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
She earned a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester and a B.Eng. from McMaster University.
With the invention of lasers, the intensity of a light wave was increased by orders of magnitude over what had been achieved with a light bulb or sunlight. This much higher intensity led to new phenomena being observed, such as violet light coming out when red light went into the material. After Gérard Mourou and I developed chirped pulse amplification, also known as CPA, the intensity again increased by more than a factor of 1,000 and it once again made new types of interactions possible between light and matter. We developed a laser that could deliver short pulses of light that knocked the electrons off their atoms. This new understanding of laser–matter interactions led to the development of new machining techniques that are used in laser eye surgery and micromachining of glass used in cell phones.
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