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Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Radio astronomer; discoverer of pulsars

United Kingdom · b. 1943

Astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who identified the first radio pulsars in 1967 as a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge. The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle. She received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 and the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 2021.

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What is the thing you are best at that nobody watching can see?

I was very, very thorough, making sure I really understood how that telescope worked, and that it was working properly. I was quite convinced that I wasn't clever enough to be in Cambridge and would be thrown out at some stage. My policy was to work as hard as I could so that I'd know I'd done my best. We now label this as impostor syndrome, but we didn't recognise, and certainly didn't name it, back then.

Recorded Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020 source

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