Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s is best known for her major astrophysical discovery of radio pulsars. Just as significant was her work to set up Athena Swan, now a national charter to advance gender equality.

Those little bits of ‘scruff’ in the data turned out to be pulsars.

In 1967, while studying for a PhD in radio astronomy at Cambridge, Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell made a major astronomical discovery.  

Jocelyn identified an entirely new class of celestial objects called radio pulsars, rapid-spinning remnants of exploded stars. This opened pulsar astronomy as a new field of research, transforming scientific understanding of the galaxy.  

Controversially, the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of pulsars was awarded to her PhD supervisor, Antony Hewish, and fellow Cambridge professor Martin Ryle. The omission of Jocelyn’s contributions led to widespread debate about scientific recognition.  

At around the same time, Jocelyn took up a role as a part-time technician at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) so she could care for her young son. There, she expanded her expertise in X ray astronomy and contributed to what she described as an “outrageously successful satellite mission that kept the team running and jumping and leaping and bouncing and shrieking throughout its seven-year lifespan”.  

It was while working at the MSSL that she heard the news: 

It was two minutes past midday, and somebody came screaming into my office: ‘Have you heard the news??’ I thought, Oh my God, the satellite's fallen. But no, it was the announcement of the Nobel Prize on the radio. That was quite a day.

Jocelyn is no stranger to discrimination. At school in Northern Ireland, she was sent to home economics while the boys were sent to science, until her parents intervened. While an undergraduate at University of Glasgow, she was the only woman in her physics class alongside 50 men, often experiencing cat calling when she entered the lecture hall. 

Determined to improve conditions for future generations, she was part of the small group of senior academic women who established Athena Swan in 2005, a national charter advancing gender equality in higher education, and later expanded to include race, LGBTQ+ and disability equity.  

Jocelyn has received some of science’s highest honours, including The Royal Society Copley Medal and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. She donated the £2.3 million Breakthrough Prize to establish the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund to support physics students from underrepresented backgrounds.  

Equality doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because we insist on it.

Top photo: Jocelyn Bell Burnell/Alamy.