Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (; née Bell; born 15 July 1943) is a Northern Irish physicist who, while conducting research for her doctorate in 1967, discovered the pulsar. This discovery was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, though she was not among its recipients. 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. In 2021, Bell Burnell became the second female recipient (after Dorothy Hodgkin in 1976) of the Copley Medal. In 2025, Bell Burnell's image was included on an An Post stamp celebrating women in STEM.
Early life and education
Bell Burnell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, to M. Allison and G. Philip Bell. Their country home was called "Solitude" and she grew up there with her younger brother and two younger sisters. She enjoyed her father's books on astronomy, and visited the nearby Armagh Observatory, where the staff encouraged her to pursue a career in astronomy. Her father, an architect, later helped design the Armagh Planetarium. She grew up in Lurgan and attended the Preparatory Department of Lurgan College from 1948 to 1956. At the time, boys could study technical subjects, but girls were expected to study domestic subjects such as cooking and cross-stitching. Bell Burnell was able to study science only after her parents and others challenged the school's policies.
She failed the eleven-plus exam and her parents sent her to The Mount School, a Quaker girls' boarding school in York, England, where she completed her secondary education in 1961. There she was favourably impressed by her physics teacher, Mr. Tillott, and stated: You do not have to learn lots and lots ... of facts; you just learn a few key things, and ... then you can apply and build and develop from those ... He was a really good teacher and showed me, actually, how easy physics was. She next joined the University of Glasgow, where in 1965 she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Philosophy (physics), with honours, and then New Hall, Cambridge, where she gained a PhD in 1969. At Cambridge, she worked with Antony Hewish and others to construct the Interplanetary Scintillation Array just outside Cambridge to study quasars, which had recently been discovered.
Career and research
On 28 November 1967, while a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Bell Burnell detected a "bit of scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. The signal had been visible in data taken in August, but as the papers had to be checked by hand, it took her three months to find it. She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every one and a third seconds. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star. This was later documented by the BBC Horizon series. In a 2020 lecture at Harvard, she related how the media was covering the discovery of pulsars, with interviews taking a standard "disgusting" format: Hewish would be asked on the astrophysics, and she would be the "human interest" part, asked about vital statistics, how many boyfriends she had, what colour is her hair, and asked to undo some buttons for the photographs. The Daily Telegraph science reporter shortened "pulsating radio source" to pulsar. She worked at the University of Southampton between 1968 and 1973, University College London from 1974 to 1982 and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (1982–1991). From 1973 to 1987 she was a tutor, consultant, examiner, and lecturer for the Open University. In 1986, she became the project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, a position she held until 1991. She was Professor of Physics at the Open University from 1991 to 2001. She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University in the United States and dean of science at the University of Bath (2001–04), and President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004. Bell Burnell was visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Mansfield College in 2007. She was President of the Institute of Physics between 2008 and 2010. In 2013, Bell Burnell was elected Pro-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin. In February 2018 she was appointed Chancellor of the University of Dundee. In 2018, Bell Burnell visited Parkes, NSW, to deliver the keynote John Bolton lecture at the Central West Astronomical Society (CWAS) AstroFest event.
Nobel Prize controversy Controversially, Bell did not receive recognition in the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics. She helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array over two years and initially noticed the anomaly, sometimes reviewing as much as 96 feet (29 m) of paper data per night. Bell later said that she had to be persistent in reporting the anomaly in the face of scepticism from Hewish, who initially insisted it was due to interference and man-made. She spoke of meetings held by Hewish and Ryle to which she was not invited.
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