What the ultrafast laser does is that because it doesn’t have to just cut from the surface, it’s only at the intense focal point that it does this damage where the electrons come off the atoms, you could actually put your laser and scan it over your cornea and it would cut underneath that.
Obviously, over the history of certainly the last 300 years, it was that men went out and worked, and women stayed home. Yes okay, that’s the way it was. But certainly it isn’t that women weren’t able to do it.
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.
When I was a first-year in grad school, there were 18 of us in the Ph.D. program, and four of us were women.
In high school, I was very good in math and physics. I wasn’t good at much of anything else. Some people are good at a lot of things. I don’t know how they choose what to do.
I hadn't looked at all the Nobel Prizes and thought, my goodness, there's no women. So it was a little bit surprising to me.
I feel unbelievably honored to be, you know, with Marie Curie and Goeppert Mayer. It's like, how can I be in the same breath as those three?
As for me, I want to have fun while I’m working. Now not everyone thinks physics is fun, but I do. I think experimental physics is especially fun, because not only do you get to solve puzzles about the universe or on Earth, there are really cool toys in the lab.
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've always been treated as an equal.
The most fun part of my day is when I get to play with my lasers.
I got paid the same as my male counterpart grad students and onward.
I was very good at math and physics. And that’s all. I can’t do music, art, so there was not a lot of choice for me. I think people should go with their strength and that was my strength.
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.'
I still try to make different types of lasers that other people don’t have.
I’ve now been encouraged by many people to apply and so I did apply and I have now been made, full professor. I’m happy about that.
Because the high-intensity pulses are short, the laser only damages the area where it's applied. The result is precise, clean cuts that are ideal for transparent materials.
It is understandable that people want to know how it affects them. But as a scientist, I would hope society would be equally interested in fundamental science.
