Donna Theo Strickland (born 27 May 1959) is a Canadian optical physicist and pioneer in the field of pulsed lasers. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, together with Gérard Mourou, for the practical implementation of chirped pulse amplification. She is a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She served as fellow, vice president, and president of Optica (formerly OSA), and is currently chair of its Presidential Advisory Committee. In 2018, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women. Early life and education Strickland was born on 27 May 1959, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada to Edith J. (), an English teacher, and Lloyd Strickland, an electrical engineer. After graduating from Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute, she decided to attend McMaster University because its engineering physics program included lasers and electro-optics, areas of particular interest to her. At McMaster, she was one of three women in a class of twenty-five. Strickland graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in engineering physics in 1981. Strickland studied for her graduate degree in The Institute of Optics, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Rochester in 1989. She conducted her doctoral research at the associated Laboratory for Laser Energetics, supervised by Gérard Mourou. Strickland and Mourou worked to develop an experimental setup that could raise the peak power of laser pulses, to overcome a limitation, that when the maximal intensity of laser pulses reached gigawatts per square centimetre, self-focusing of the pulses severely damaged the amplifying part of the laser. Their 1985 technique of chirped pulse amplification stretched out each laser pulse both spectrally and in time before amplifying it, then compressed each pulse back to its original duration, generating ultrashort optical pulses of terawatt to petawatt intensity. Using chirped pulse amplification allowed smaller high-power laser systems to be built on a typical laboratory optical table, as "table-top terawatt lasers". The work received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. Career and research From 1988 to 1991, Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada, where she worked with Paul Corkum in the Ultrafast Phenomena Section, which had the distinction at that time of having produced the most powerful short-pulse laser in the world. She worked in the laser division of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1991 to 1992 and joined the technical staff of Princeton University's Advanced Technology Center for Photonics