The Discovery of Pulsars: A Graduate Student's Tale, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Channel: Northern Virginia Astronomy Club
Date: 2022-12-23

In this talk Jocelyn will describe the discovery of pulsars (pulsating radio stars) from the point of view of the student involved in the discovery.   I will also reflect on the treatment of young women scientists in the 1960s.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsar in 1967.  

Jocelyn Burnell has worked in many roles and in many branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family. She is now a Visiting Academic in Oxford, and the Chancellor of the University of Dundee, Scotland.  She has been President of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society, in 2008 became the first female President of the Institute of Physics for the UK and Ireland, and in 2014 the first female President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was one of the small group of women scientists that set up the Athena SWAN scheme.

She has received many honors, including a $3M Breakthrough Prize in 2018.

The public appreciation and understanding of science have always been important to her, and she is much in demand as a speaker and broadcaster.  In her spare time, she gardens, listens to choral music and is active in the Quakers. She has co-edited an anthology of poetry with an astronomical theme – ‘Dark Matter; Poems of Space’.