Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943)
Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born Susan Jocelyn Bell in Belfast in 1943. She lived in Lurgan as a child and attended Lurgan College. At eleven, she failed her 11+ exam and her parents sent her to the Mount School, the Quaker girls' school in York. She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a B.Sc. physics in 1965 and received her Ph.D. from New Hall, Cambridge in 1969. She married Martin Burnell in 1968.
Among the most significant astronomical discoveries of the late twentieth century was the finding of pulsars – rotating neutron stars which send out radio waves, like lighthouse beams sweeping the universe. It was in 1967 while Bell Burnell - then researching for her doctoral thesis - was mapping the radio scintillation of quasars, when she with her supervisor Anthony Hewish began to chart a puzzling signal - a string of pulses a few seconds apart. It seemed so alien that they nicknamed it “LGM” – little green men! – but the discovery of a second pulse by Bell Burnell led to the identification of a previously unknown phenomenon. The paper announcing the discovery had five authors; Hewish was listed first as the team leader, Bell Burnell second. In 1974 Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with Martin Ryle. Bell Burnell was not included as a co-recipient, which was controversial at the time.
A pulsar
After finishing her PhD, she worked at the University of Southampton (1968-73), University College London (1974-82) and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (1982-91). From 1991 to 2001 she was Professor of Physics at the Open University. She was President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004 and is the present President of the Institute of Physics, the first woman to hold the post. She has campaigned to improve the status and number of women in the fields of physics and astronomy.
She has been an active Quaker since her schooldays, and her distinguished academic career has never prevented her serving the Society of Friends in many capacities. She was Clerk to Britain Yearly Meeting in 1995, 1996 and 1997. She delivered a Swarthmore Lecture under the title Broken for life at Yearly Meeting in Aberdeen in 1989. She served on the Quaker Peace and Social Witness Testimonies Committee, which produced Engaging with the Quaker Testimonies: a Toolkit (2007), for which she wrote the introductory essay. In August 2007, she was appointed Clerk of the Central Executive Committee of Friends World Committee for Consultation for 2008–12.
