Speaking to a packed room of Barnard students, faculty, alumnae, and science enthusiasts, physicist Donna Strickland shared details of the research that helped her win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Strickland, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, along with Gérard Mourou, for their work creating ultrashort, high-intensity laser pulses. These laser pulses, known as chirped pulse amplification, have many uses, including medical applications such as corrective eye surgeries and cancer treatment, electronic and materials fabrication, as well as measuring ultrafast scientific processes.
She is one of only three women to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
“For me Barnard is unique in that it’s the first school that I’ve been to where all of the students are women,” Strickland said. “So it’s quite different for me to see an entire physics class made of women.”
Her biggest advice to students: don’t give up when you encounter a problem you can’t figure out.
“The message that I love to give is just the fact that you learn the most from failures. That it's not understanding something – that is the key to science. Figure out why it's not working," Strickland said.
Strickland met with students and faculty at Barnard on Sept. 11 before giving a public lecture called "Generating High-Intensity, Ultrashort Optical Pulses." The next day, Strickland gave a specialized research talk at Columbia University’s Pupin Hall called "Investigation of Multi-frequency Raman Generated Spectra."
For many students who attended, the ability to meet Strickland and hear her discuss her work was both personally and professionally inspirational.
"It's really cool that we got to meet a Nobel Laureate, and my research is pretty much about what she was talking about today so that was really interesting to get to meet someone who won the Nobel Prize in the field of research that I'm doing," said Bianca Fernandez '27.
While Strickland is a trailblazer as a female Nobel Laureate physicist – joining the ranks of Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert Mayer – she told The Guardian she hopes to normalize women in science, adding, “I don’t see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist” – a message that resonated with students interested in STEM-fields at the College.
"It's just really great to be able to hear maybe her more personal stories from her school experiences and navigating the field of physics, both as a person and a woman," said Sylvia Whang '26.