Illustration of Canadian physicist Donna Strickland (born 1959). Strickland is best known for her pioneering work in high-intensity pulsed lasers. While studying for her PhD under Gerard Mourou they developed a way to increase the intensity of a laser pulse without damaging the laser system. They achieved this by stretching the pulses to reduce their peak power, then amplifying them and finally compressing them back into a short pulse. This process, known as chirped pulse amplification, dramatically increased the pulse intensity and has found applications in corrective eye surgery, industrial machining and medical imaging. Strickland was awarded a share of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work along with Mourou and Arthur Ashkin.