Woman astronomer passed over by Nobel jury wins £2.3m prize

A FEMALE astronomer who was shunned for a Nobel Prize in 1974 when her male collaborators received the award is to donate millions from a new science prize to help the next generation of women in physics.

Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been awarded a Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery of radio pulsars, which was the subject of her work more than 40 years ago.

The Breakthrough award, which includes a £2.3million prize, also recognises her scientific leadership. She will receive the award in November at a ceremony in Silicon Valley, California.

Prof Bell Burnell, whose story has both inspired and motivated women to follow her path, says she has no qualms after being passed over for the Nobel Prize for her discovery of cosmic objects that light up the heavens.

But in handing over the funds from her latest award, she says it will go to fund women, under-represented ethnic minority and refugee students to become physics researchers.

“I don’t want or need the money myself and it seemed to me that this was perhaps the best use I could put to it,” she told BBC News.

“I found pulsars because I was a minority

‘I have this hunch that minority folk bring a fresh angle on things and that is often very productive’

person and feeling a at Cambridge.

“I was both female but also from the north-west of the country and I think everybody else around me was southern English,” she said.

“So I have this hunch that minority folk bring a fresh angle on things and that is often a very productive thing. In general, a lot of breakthroughs come bit overawed from left field.” Prof Bell Burnell, from Northern Ireland said she was “speechless” at being given the award but hopes to conquer “unconscious bias” she believes still occurs in physics research jobs.

As a PHD student, she was widely acknowledged to have made one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century, when she detected the first radio pulsar, a kind of neutron star, in the late Sixties, as part of a postgraduate research project.

Her supervisor, Antony Hewish, and another researcher, Martin Ryle, went on to collect the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery.

Despite being overlooked, Prof Bell Burnell continued to break new ground for women, serving as president of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics.

She is now visiting professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University, and president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.