Dr. Paul Corkum's doctoral degree is in theoretical physics, but he is a natural experimenter. Fascinated by the inner-workings of just about everything, he once took apart his car engine and reassembled it — and it still worked.

Telling that story got him hired at NRC. More than 25 years later, Dr. Corkum takes atoms apart and puts them back together again as part of his research as Director of Attosecond Science at the NRC Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences, and a Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa.

In March 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper presented Dr. Corkum with the Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. This is the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada's highest honour — and Canada's most prestigious science prize. Dr. Corkum's selection stems from his innovative research in "attosecond science." The ultimate goal of his work is to control the movement of electrons as they speed along inside molecules, which promises breakthrough applications in fields ranging from quantum computing to diagnostic medicine.

Dr. Paul Corkum and Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Dr. Corkum's research has already garnered many honours and prizes, including the Order of Canada, a Killam Prize and the Polanyi Award for outstanding achievement in the field of natural sciences. He earned these awards not only for capturing the first-ever image of an electron orbiting an atom, but also for building the conceptual model that allowed him to do so. The result: a revolutionary method that emits an attosecond laser pulse.

An attosecond is one billionth of one billionth of a second. It's a thousand times faster than a femtosecond (which used to be the shortest controlled light pulse), and a billion times faster than a nanosecond. This is so short a time that one attosecond is to one second as a second is to the age of the universe.

Dr. Corkum uses attosecond laser pulses to image electrons. Imaging an electron is the first step to unpacking the molecules that make up all the matter of our universe. To get images of smaller, faster particles closer to the centre of a molecule will require even faster light pulses. Yet mapping an entire molecule remains his goal.

Dr. Corkum dreams of using attosecond laser beams to explore the molecular structure of biological cells. "Right now, we don't have a molecular-scale map of a cell," he says. "Maybe we could use these intense light pulses to determine the mass and position of every molecule in a cell."