Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS FRSE

Biography

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943-) graduated with Honours in Physics from the Universityof Glasgow  and  completed a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, where she discovered radio pulsars. Her thesis supervisor, Antony Hewish, was later awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics for his role in the discovery, although controversially she was not a co-recipient.

Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and St Andrews Universities have given her Honorary Doctorates. In 2007 she was made a Dame  which was reported in press as “going some way to righting one of the most notorious wrongs in science.” She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

A Celebration of Women in Astronomy - synopsis