Optical Physicist
Donna is the third woman in history to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. She is half of the team that discovered Chirped Pulse Amplification, a technique that amplifies ultra short laser pulse. This technique can be used in a variety of applications from manufacturing to medicine.
Her interest in lasers comes from a trip to the science center when she was five years old. Her dad told her that lasers were the way of the future. Years later when she was looking at colleges, she found that McMaster University’s physics department had a major in laser optics, and she was sold.
3 Things We Love About Donna:
- Her research has been used for vision corrective surgery.
- She sees herself as a scientist, rather than a woman in science.
- She loves math and science, but most of all, she loves lasers.