News

Ursula Keller wins “Swiss Nobel” Marcel Benoist Prize- for pioneering work in ultrafast lasers
MUST2022 Conference- a great success!
New scientific highlights- by MUST PIs Wörner, Chergui, and Richardson
FELs of Europe prize for Jeremy Rouxel- “Development or innovative use of advanced instrumentation in the field of FELs”
Ruth Signorell wins Doron prizefor pioneering contributions to the field of fundamental aerosol science
New FAST-Fellow Uwe Thumm at ETH- lectures on Topics in Femto- and Attosecond Science
International Day of Women and Girls in Science- SSPh asked female scientists about their experiences
New scientific highlight- by MUST PIs Milne, Standfuss and Schertler
EU XFEL Young Scientist Award for Camila Bacellar,beamline scientist and group leader of the Alvra endstation at SwissFEL
Prizes for Giulia Mancini and Rebeca Gomez CastilloICO/IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics & Ernst Haber 2021
Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to RESOLV Member Benjamin List- for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis
NCCR MUST at Scientifica 2021- Lightning, organic solar cells, and virtual molecules

A female physicist wins the Nobel Prize for just the third time in 117 Years

Women-Physics-NP
Since 1901, when the annual Nobel Prize in Physics was first awarded, it has been given almost exclusively to men. That changed this week, when the number rose to three. Donna Strickland, a Canadian who is an associate professor of physics at the University of Waterloo, received the prize on Tuesday for her work on high-intensity laser pulses. That work resulted in Dr. Strickland’s first published scientific paper in 1985, and she went on to base her doctoral dissertation on it. At the time, scientists had been trying to figure out how to amplify high-energy laser pulses without destroying the amplifiers. Dr. Strickland suggested stretching out the pulses in time, amplifying them and then compressing them again to the desired level of intensity. Their method, known as chirped pulse amplification, allowed for more precision in laser technology and has allowed for several real-world applications, including Lasik eye surgery.

Dr. Strickland said that her work depended in part on the work of the two women who won the Nobel Prize in Physics before her.

Marie Curie was the first woman to win the prize in 1903, for the discovery of radioactivity. (Eight years later, she also won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on isolating pure radium.) The second was Maria Goeppert Mayer, who won in 1963 for developing a model that could predict the properties of atomic nuclei. But for 54 years after that, only men won the Nobel Prize in Physics. And only a handful of women won the prize in either of the other two scientific categories: chemistry and physiology or medicine. Last year, the nine people who won Nobel Prizes in all three of the scientific categories were men from Western countries.


Download (75 KB)
NCCR MUST Office : ETHZ IQE/ULP-HPT H3 | Auguste-Piccard-Hof 1 | 8093 Zurich | E-Mail
The National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCR) are a research instrument of the Swiss National Science Foundation