Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Ultrafast Chirality for Health, Environment, and Quantum Technologies

Government of Canada priority area: Health, including biotechnology

Many molecules essential to life exist in two mirror-image forms. Although they look nearly identical, these two forms can behave very differently in the body: one may treat a disease while the other causes harm, as tragically shown by the drug thalidomide. This property, called chirality, is at the heart of medicine, drug development and environmental science, but detecting it reliably remains a major challenge. Today’s methods are slow, require large samples, and cannot work in real time, making early diagnosis and rapid quality control difficult.

Professor Smirnova’s research offers a new solution based on synthetic chiral light. These are ultrafast multicolour light fields that combine several colours of light so that the resulting field traces a three-dimensional chiral structure in time. Unlike conventional optical methods that rely on weak magnetic interactions between light and molecules, this approach produces signals up to 1,000 times stronger, enabling the researcher and her team to distinguish between mirror-image forms of molecules far more quickly and accurately than any current technique.

The potential benefits are far-reaching. In health care, this technology could detect diseases like cancer and neurodegeneration by identifying molecular changes in blood or tissue linked to these conditions. In the pharmaceutical industry, it could speed up quality control and improve drug safety. In environmental monitoring, it could help track pollutants and trace their sources and transformation in water, air and food.
The program also explores how the natural structure of chiral molecules can be harnessed to build more efficient and sustainable spintronic and quantum technologies, contributing to Canada’s leadership in quantum innovation.

At the University of Ottawa, Professor Smirnova will collaborate with leading researchers in structured light, quantum technologies and biosensing to build a world-first integrated platform for ultrafast chiral detection, working closely with health-care, industry and environmental monitoring partners, which include Thermo Fisher Scientific and uOttawa-affiliated hospitals.

Olga Smirnova holds an MSc (1996) and PhD in Physics (2000) from Moscow State University. She trained as a Lisa Meitner Fellow at the Technische Universität Wien (2003–2005) before joining the National Research Council of Canada’s Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences in Ottawa, where she held a tenured research position from 2006 to 2009. She then founded and has led the Strong Field Theory Group at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy in Berlin since 2009, a group established with a special Leibniz Foundation grant. She has been a  full professor of physics at Technische Universität Berlin since 2016 and holds a visiting professorship at the Technion, Israel (2022–2027).

Professor Smirnova is recognized as the world leader in attosecond imaging and control of charge and spin dynamics in matter, and a founding architect of the field of ultrafast chirality. She pioneered synthetic chiral light, a discovery that makes it possible to distinguish between mirror-image forms of molecules with a sensitivity up to 1,000 times greater than was previously possible.

She has published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles, including in Nature, Science, Nature Physics, and Nature Photonics, with more than 13,000 citations. Her discoveries have led to two international patents. She received the Ahmed Zewail Award in Ultrafast Science and Technology (2020), the highest distinction in her field, and holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant (2021).

She serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility, the Editorial Board of Physical Review X, and the AMO Physics Division Board of the European Physical Society.