Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell made one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century when she detected radio pulsars while completing her PhD at Cambridge University in the late 1960s.

	Susan Jocelyn Bell (Burnell)

Born in Belfast in 1943 her Quaker parents encouraged her early interest in science with books and trips to a nearby observatory. Jocelyn excelled in science classes at the Quaker school she attended and went on to graduate from the University of Glasgow with a degree in Physics.

After graduating in 1965, she studied radio astronomy at the University of Cambridge where she helped build a large radio telescope designed by Anthony Hewish (her PhD advisor) and Martin Ryle to monitor quasars. Jocelyn was tasked with analysing the data from the radio telescope and noticed some strange radio pulses coming from a single point in the sky that didn't fit with the patterns produced by quasars. By a process of elimination the team were able to deduce that the sources of the radio-pulses were made by rapidly spinning neutron stars.

Although only Hewlish and Ryle received the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work (which some regarded as a scandal at the time), Jocelyn has earned countless awards and honours establishing herself as an esteemed leader in her field.940s. Find out more about Jocelyn Bell Burnell here