In 117 yrs, Strickland is only the 3rd woman to win Nobel Prize in Physics

Three, only three, is the number of women who have been awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in the 117-year history of the prize. Donna Strickland, aged 59 and an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, is the female academic who this year was awarded the holy grail recognition for her major contribution to physics. She shares the 2018 prize with Arthur Ashkin and Gérard Mourou. The last time a woman received the Nobel Prize in Physics was 55 years ago, when Maria Goeppert-Mayer won in 1963. Before that it was the exceptional Marie Curie who won the prize in 1903. In 1911 Curie also won the Nobel prize in Chemistry. A major breakthrough Strickland’s technique (powerful short laser pulses) was developed jointly with her PhD advisor Mourou, and is one of those major breakthroughs that any physicist would envy. It has myriad far-reaching applications, including in the field of medicine and the fight against cancer. Some will see this award as a powerful response to the recent polemics that took place at CERN – one of the leading physics institutions in the world – after a male physicist argued at a workshop on equity and diversity that “physics was invented and built by men; it is not by invitation”.