Marie Curie is in a class all her own as the first female winner and still the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different science categories. An astounding scientist.
We read to our kids at bedtime because we want to have literacy, but what are we doing to make sure kids are equally fascinated by science?
My parents were definitely the biggest influence in my life.
I got paid the same as my male counterpart grad students and onward.
Because the high-intensity pulses are short, the laser only damages the area where it's applied. The result is precise, clean cuts that are ideal for transparent materials.
What the ultrafast laser does is that because it doesn’t have to just cut from the surface, it’s only at the intense focal point that it does this damage where the electrons come off the atoms, you could actually put your laser and scan it over your cornea and it would cut underneath that.
When I was a first-year in grad school, there were 18 of us in the Ph.D. program, and four of us were women.
I have great faith in lasers, but no one’s putting one near my eye.
My PhD project was actually doing something that required a high-intensity laser. It was supposed to work in a way that many, many photons of light would interact with an atom all at the same time.
Gérard Mourou, who was my PhD supervisor, dreamed up the idea of increasing laser intensity by orders of magnitude. He did it while he was on a ski trip with his family. He probably shouldn’t have been thinking about lasers.
We proved that we could increase laser intensity by orders of magnitude. In fact, CPA led to the most intense laser pulses ever recorded. Our findings changed the world's understanding of how atoms interact with high-intensity light.
I think we’ve been pushing for a lot of years and I do feel like women’s lib was talked about a lot in the 70s and I certainly always felt that, you know, as a woman, I could do whatever the heck I wanted.
I mean I certainly tell the Maria Goeppert-Mayer story and I’m happy that life isn’t like that. I’m glad there were trailblazers like her and Marie Curie.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer, you know, she didn’t even get paid to be a scientist. And yet, she was doing Nobel Prize-winning work. How ridiculous is that?
For her PhD, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a theoretical physicist, came up with the idea of multi-photon physics. That means an atom absorbs two or more photons simultaneously.
I feel unbelievably honored to be, you know, with Marie Curie and Goeppert Mayer. It's like, how can I be in the same breath as those three?
My PhD was not fast out of the gate.
I just think white light generation is just one of these remarkable things to see, and actually, you know, one colour of light goes in to just water or any clear anything and out comes all the colours of the rainbow when the pulses are short and intense enough.
I was a very shy kid and both my best friend and my sister went to Waterloo, and I just thought no I can’t, I can’t go there because I’ll just hang on to them and no one will even know who the heck I am and that’s no way to go through life.
