But I don’t see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist.
There’s no point in me being something other than me.
We read to our kids at bedtime because we want to have literacy, but what are we doing to make sure kids are equally fascinated by science?
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.
I think we’ve been pushing for a lot of years and I do feel like women’s lib was talked about a lot in the 70s and I certainly always felt that, you know, as a woman, I could do whatever the heck I wanted.
I mean, so hopefully soon there’s enough women and enough people of colour and enough of every group out there that feels that they get the recognition they deserve, and then we don’t have to talk about it anymore.
I feel that women should start to get to be recognized more because for some reason not all men want to recognize us or not all people, but I think that's a minority. I think the majority of people are ready.
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.
For her PhD, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a theoretical physicist, came up with the idea of multi-photon physics. That means an atom absorbs two or more photons simultaneously.
My PhD project was actually doing something that required a high-intensity laser. It was supposed to work in a way that many, many photons of light would interact with an atom all at the same time.
We proved that we could increase laser intensity by orders of magnitude. In fact, CPA led to the most intense laser pulses ever recorded. Our findings changed the world's understanding of how atoms interact with high-intensity light.
We must give scientists the opportunity through funding and time to pursue curiosity-based, long-term, basic-science research.
Sometimes you just have to be happy you get one chance in life and not worry too much about whether you get two.
Marie Curie is in a class all her own as the first female winner and still the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different science categories. An astounding scientist.
If somebody else thinks something that you don't believe in, just think they're wrong and you're right and keep going. That's pretty much the way I always think.
I just think white light generation is just one of these remarkable things to see, and actually, you know, one colour of light goes in to just water or any clear anything and out comes all the colours of the rainbow when the pulses are short and intense enough.
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?
My PhD was not fast out of the gate.
My parents were definitely the biggest influence in my life.
I have great faith in lasers, but no one’s putting one near my eye.
