Jocelyn Bell Burnell wins Copley Medal
‘My career has not fitted a conventional – male – pattern.'
The Quaker astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell has become the second woman to win the Copley Medal for her work on the discovery of pulsars.
The former pupil from the Quaker Mount School in York said that she was ‘amazed’. It was the first major recognition that she had received from the Royal Society, she said. The Quaker from Northern Ireland was famously passed over for the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics, when, as a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in 1967, she discovered the pulsar. The prize was awarded to her male PhD supervisor instead.
She said: ‘With many more women having successful careers in science, and gaining recognition for their transformational work, I hope there will be many more female Copley winners in the near future.
‘My career has not fitted a conventional – male – pattern.
‘Being the first person to identify pulsars would be the highlight of any career; but I have also swung sledgehammers and built radio telescopes; set up a successful group of my own studying binary stars; and was the first female president of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
‘I hope that my work and presence as a senior woman in science continues to encourage more women to pursue scientific careers.’
Jocelyn Bell Burnell is the second woman to receive the Royal Society’s highest award after Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.
Other recipients include Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein.
The award includes a £25,000 gift which she will add to the Institute of Physics’ Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, providing grants to graduate students from under-represented groups in physics.
The Quaker was one of twenty-six medal and award winners announced on 24 August by the Royal Society, recognising research and outstanding contributions in the fields of advancing quantum computing, revolutionising prenatal testing, and challenging racist pseudoscience.
