CAP member Xiaoyi Bao has been awarded the 2025 winner of NSERC’s Donna Strickland Prize for Societal Impact of Natural Science and Engineering Research in recognition of her novel Distributed Acoustic Sensor (DAS) technology that transforms ordinary optical fibres into ultra-sensitive “ears” that detect stress, cracks, and vibrations in infrastructure ranging from bridges and pipelines to railways and reactors.
Xiaoyi Bao is a Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa where she investigates distributed fiber sensors and nanofiber devices for high precision instrumentation and sensors. She held a Tier 1 CRC in Fiber Optics and Photonics (2003-2023), and is a Fellow of the OSA, the SPIE, the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Association of Physicists. Amongst other honours, she has been awarded the 2010 CAP-INO Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Applied Photonics, the 2013 CAP Medal for Achievement in Industrial and Applied Physics, and the 2024 CAP Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics.
For more information, please see the announcement on the NSERC webpage.