Physicist Donna Strickland on Her ‘Surreal’ Nobel Prize Win and the Challenges for Women in Science

Physicist Donna Strickland, a self-described “laser jock” who prefers to keep a low profile, won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday, becoming the third woman ever to do so — an achievement she described as “surreal.” “It’s hard for me to take it in right now,” Strickland tells TIME. “But I’m trying to enjoy it.” An associate professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, she spent the morning fielding emails from around the world, visiting with students who showed up at her door with congratulations, and discussing the Nobel Prize-winning research that she completed in 1985 as a 26-year-old graduate student. “It’s kind of mind boggling, isn’t it?” Strickland says. “It’s not like I was thinking, ‘Oh, somebody should give me a Nobel Prize.’ It’s sort of surreal.” Strickland is the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in any category since 2015. And she is just the third woman to ever win a Nobel Prize in physics. Marie Curie, who researched radioactive substances and remains the only woman to win two Nobel prizes, won the prize for physics in 1903. Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who discovered the nuclear shell structure and worked unpaid for many years, followed in 1963. But Strickland’s achievement comes a day after an Italian physicist was suspended from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, for saying that physics was “in...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Canada nobel prize onetime Science Source Type: news