Jocelyn Bell Burnells father helped design the Armagh Planetarium, and wrote books on astronomy that inspired her as a child. At first, during her education, she was unable to study science simply because of her gender, but when her parents, and others, protested against this policy, the rules changed. Whilst studying for her PhD at Cambridge University, she began working as part of a team to build a radio telescope to study quasars. During her work, she detected some scruff on her papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. This was a radio signal, and Jocelyn realised that this signal was pulsing at regular, 1.337 second intervals. She discovered three more of the signals, and traced them to rotating neutron stars that would be called pulsars. Jocelyn was the second author on a paper detailing the discovery, and her supervisor and his colleague were subsequently awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, but Jocelyn was not a recipient. She modestly brushes off this omission as she was a student at the time, and suggests an award to me would have debased the prize". However, she became president of the Royal Astronomical Society, president of the Institute of Physics and appointed Dame Commander (DBE) of the Order of the British Empire. Her career spanned many institutions and she worked on infrared and optical astronomy. She has also been engaged with encouraging women into science - someone we can learn from. What women in science have inspired you? Can you imagine yourself, or someone you know becoming such an influential person in the scientific community, changing the world as we know it?
