A Conversation between Professor Dame Athene Donald and Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell

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• Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell, Visiting Professor of Astrophysics, Department of Astrophysics, University of Oxford
• Thursday 08 November 2018, 17:30-18:30
• Wolfson Hall, Churchill College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact em480.

A series of conversations with distinguished academics hosted by Professor Dame Athene Donald.

What do academics actually do? What motivates them to get out of bed each morning and to deliver what is — or in many cases what isn’t – expected of them?

For a student setting out, the life of senior academics may seem very mysterious, particularly as many may end up taking on responsibilities and activities far removed from where an individual started. The trajectory from student to senior academic is rarely a straight line, with twists, setbacks, timeout and/or opportunities (taken or declined) all to be combined with a personal life.

This series of conversations aims to explore the individual paths of some eminent academics who have made it to the top in their own particular ways. How have they found their own solutions to ‘life’, what tips do they wish they’d been given earlier on, and what might they view, retrospectively, with most pleasure or regret?

The next in this series of conversations will be with Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell — the astrophysicist recently awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her discovery of pulsars in 1967, but who was passed over for the Nobel prize at the time.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist, best known for her discovery of pulsars — rotating neutron stars that appear to ‘pulse’ since the beam of radio waves they emit can only be seen when it faces the Earth. Her observation, made together with her supervisor, Antony Hewish, is considered to be one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the twentieth century.

In 1967, Jocelyn made her discovery using a telescope that she and Antony had originally built to study the recently detected star-like quasars. She noted a signal that pulsed once every second — nicknamed ‘Little Green Men’ — that was later determined to be a pulsar. Antony went on to receive the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in the discovery.

Jocelyn has since become a role model for young students and female scientists throughout the world. She was appointed to CBE for services to astronomy in 1999, followed by a DBE in 2007. Her story was featured in the BBC Four’s Beautiful Minds, and BBC Two’s Horizon documented her discovery of ‘Little Green Man 1’.

She is currently Visiting Professor of Astrophysics, Department of Astrophysics, University of Oxford and Chancellor, University of Dundee.

This talk is part of the Give Me Inspiration! The Paradigm Shift series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Give Me Inspiration! The Paradigm Shift
• Wolfson Hall, Churchill College

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