Jocelyn Bell Burnell: 15th July

 Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943)  is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. 

Jocelyn Bell was educated in Northern Ireland, the Quaker Mount School in York, the University of Glasgow and as a post graduate student at Cambridge, where she constructed the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, a large radio telescope, with 4 other PhD students to study quasars. Her discovery of pulsars took three months of analysis by hand of traces the chart recorder output.

She has had a distinguished astronomy career at the Universities of Sounhamptopn, UCL, the Royal Observatory, Edinburough, The Open University (where she was professor of Physics) and Bath (as Dean of Science). She was the President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004 and was awarded their Copley Medal. in 2021.

In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, used the $3 million  prize money to establish a fund to help female, minority and refugee students to become research physicists.

She was the centre of controversy in 1974 when her supervisor at Cambridge was awarded was awarded a Nobel Prise for the discovery of Pulsars.