Donna Strickland
active c. 1959, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Canadian physicist who co-invented CPA in her PhD thesis — the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
As Mourou's student at Rochester, Strickland studied stretching and compressing laser pulses in her 1985 thesis — the work that became CPA. After NRC Canada she joined the University of Waterloo studying nonlinear optics; the 2018 Nobel made her only the third woman honored in Physics, after Curie (1903) and Goeppert Mayer (1963).
Nobel-winning work
Strickland–Mourou's CPA splits the 'high energy + short duration' problem into two steps: a diffraction grating spreads the pulse into a color sweep (chirp) before amplification, then compression reverses it. Every modern ultrafast laser — from eye surgery to compact particle accelerators — uses this principle.
Workplaces: University of Waterloo
Canada