Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Photo with thanks to University of Bath

Dame Jocelyn is a world-renowned British scientist and Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. She discovered radio pulsars whilst a postgraduate student at Cambridge in the 1960’s, a finding for which her PhD advisor, Antony Hewish, later shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. She holds numerous awards and honorary degrees, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and has served as president of the Institute of Physics. She was one of the scientists featured in the BBC 4 Beautiful Minds series.

Originally from Belfast, she has strong Scottish connections — her BSc is from the University of Glasgow and she worked at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh for several years.

Dame Jocelyn is a champion for women in science, an innovative science communicator (for example using poetry to engage listeners with astronomy) and an active Quaker.

Sites about Jocelyn

• Her Wikipedia entry
• An interview with Science Omega
• Her Beautiful Minds entry
• Her BBC Science entry

Selected publications

• Observation of a rapidly pulsating radio source, A Hewish, S J Bell, J D Pilkington, P F Scott and R A Collins, Nature, 1968, 217, 709.
• Observations of some further pulsed radio sources, J D Pilkington, A Hewish, S J Bell and T W Cole, Nature, 1968, 218, 126. [Note: viewable by subscription.]
• Little green men, white dwarfs, or what, S J B Burnell, Sky and Telescope, 1978, 55, 218.
• So few pulsars, so few females, S J B Burnell, Science, 2004, 5670, 489.
• Darkmatter: Poems of Space, Maurice Riordan and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2008. ISBN 978-1903080108.