Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell CH DBE FRS FRSE FRAS FInstP HonMRIA
Bell Burnell in 2009
83rd President of the Royal Astronomical Society
In office 2002–2004
Preceded by	Nigel Weiss
Succeeded by	Kathryn Whaler
Personal details
Born	Susan Jocelyn Bell (1943-07-15) 15 July 1943 (age 81)[1] Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland[2][3]
Education	Lurgan College The Mount School, York
Alma mater	University of Glasgow (BS, 1965) University of Cambridge (PhD, 1969)
Known for	Discovering pulsars (1967)[7]
Spouse	Martin Burnell ​ ​ (m. 1968; div. 1993)​
Children	1
Awards	J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (1978) Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize (1986) Herschel Medal (1989) Michael Faraday Prize (2010) Royal Medal (2015) Grande Médaille (2018) Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2018) Copley Medal (2021) Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2021) Prix Jules Janssen (2022) Cunningham Medal (2023)
Honours	Order of the British Empire (Commander, 1999; Dame Commander, 2007), Order of the Companions of Honour (2025)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics Astrophysics
Institutions	University of Southampton (1968–1973) Open University (1973–1987, 1991–2001) University College London (1974–1982) Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (1982–1991) University of Bath (2001–2004)
Thesis	The Measurement of radio source diameters using a diffraction method (1968)
Doctoral advisor	Antony Hewish[4][5][6]
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell's voice from the BBC programme The Life Scientific, 19 December 2018.[8]
Website	www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/people/bellburnell

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (/bɜːrˈnɛl/; née Bell; born 15 July 1943) is a Northern Irish physicist who, as a doctoral student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967.^[9][10] This discovery later earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, but she was not among the awardees.^[11]

Bell Burnell was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and interim president of the Institute following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011. She was Chancellor of the University of Dundee from 2018 to 2023.

In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to use the $3 million (£2.3 million) prize money to establish a fund to help female, minority and refugee students to become research physicists. The fund is administered by the Institute of Physics.^{[12][13][14][15]}

In 2021, Bell Burnell became the second female recipient (after Dorothy Hodgkin in 1976) of the Copley Medal.^[16] In 2025, Bell Burnell's image was included on an An Post stamp celebrating women in STEM.^[17]