Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell to be Royal Society's first female president
The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and the arts, has appointed its first female president. She will take up the three-year post as president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which received its royal charter in 1783, in October. She takes over from Sir John Arbuthnott, who said he was "delighted to welcome Dame Jocelyn as my successor". Read more
The discovery of radio pulsars in the 1960s was hailed as a great astronomical leap forward but when it came to a Nobel Prize the woman on the team was left off the list. Two men picked up the award in 1974 leaving astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell with nothing for her role in discovering the neutron stars that provided the strongest confirmation yet of Einstein's theory that physicists believe best explains gravity. One of her fellow astronomers at the time, Sir Fred Hoyle, roundly condemned the decision but today Professor Dame Bell Burnell harbours no bitterness. Read more
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS (born 15 July 1943), known as Jocelyn Bell Burnell, is a Northern Irish astrophysicist who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Martin Ryle. Read more
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a woman on a mission to reveal the friendly face of physics Physicists love to talk about "paradigm shifts". Their discipline is littered with them: dramatic changes in thinking that fundamentally altered the way scientists look at the world. For Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the new head of the Institute of Physics, we are on the verge of not one but two such paradigm shifts. The first will completely change our view of the universe. The second will alter the way we see physicists themselves. The former professor of physics at the Open University, and current visiting professor of astrophysics at Oxford, tackles the more familiar revolution first: our effort to unlock the mysteries of creation.