Donna Strickland

I've always been treated as an equal. ”

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." ”

Sometimes you just have to be happy you get one chance in life and not worry too much about whether you get two. ”

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. ”

My parents were definitely the biggest influence in my life. ”

McMaster had an engineering physics program and... one of the parts of it was lasers and electro-optics and I just said, 'Now doesn’t that sound cool. I just got to do that.'" ”

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." ”

I have great faith in lasers, but no one’s putting one near my eye." ”

I think for a long time we were just 10 percent women in physics, and so obviously people can see things in the way they’ve always been seen." ”

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?" ”