Donna Strickland
Meet Nobel Prize-winning physicist Donna Strickland, whose work on chirped pulse amplification helped create the most intense laser pulses ever achieved.
Last updated 3 August 2026
Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. In 2018, she received the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with her then PhD supervisor Gérard Mourou, for developing chirped pulse amplification. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Prof Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester in New York. Together, they paved the way towards the most intense laser pulses ever created.
Prof 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. She was named a Companion of the Order of Canada, and is also a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award and a Cottrell Scholar Award.
Prof Strickland served as the president of the Optical Society (OSA) in 2013. She is a fellow of OSA and SPIE, the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society. She is also 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 Science. She earned a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester and a B.Eng. from McMaster University.