Susan Jocelyn Bell-Burnell - Radio, Gamma Ray, X-ray, Infrared Waves from the Stars
© Jackie DiGiovanni
Susan Jocelyn Bell was born July 15, 1943. Her father was an architect for the nearby Armagh Observatory. He enjoyed a large library and encouraged her to read. She was especially drawn to the books on astronomy.
At eleven, she scored poorly on an examination designed to identify students who would succeed in college. Her parents decided to send her to Mount School, a Quaker girls' boarding school in York, England. She was impressed by a physics teacher and quickly absorbed the lessons. She explains in an interview with M.K. Marsh Weatherall:
You don't 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.
Bell went on to graduate from the University of Glasgow in 1965 with a degree in physics, then earned a Ph.D. in radio astronomy from Cambridge University in 1969. She gained notice while a graduate student studying under Anthony Hewish: she discovered the first four pulsars. Pulsars are a category of neutron stars that emit regular bursts of radio waves. Her supervisor and Sir Martin Ryle shared a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974. Hewish was named for the work on pulsars; Bell was not included.
She had married Martin Burnell in 1968. Her long and remarkable career is especially noteworthy since she spent the next eighteen years working part-time while she raised her son and followed her husband as he pursued his government job from city to city.
From 1968 through 1970 she worked in gamma ray astronomy as a Research Council Fellow at the University of Southampton, England. From 1970-73 she advanced to a Teaching Fellow in the physics department. In 1974 she became a graduate programmer in x-ray astronomy for the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College in London. In 1976 she was promoted to Associate Research Fellow.
From 1982 through 1986 Bell-Burnell worked in infrared astronomy as a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in 1986 was named the Senior Science Officer. She headed the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope section and worked on a project based in Hawaii.
Beginning in 1991, Bell-Burnell accepted a full-time position as professor of physics and department chair at the Open University in England. She is fond of pointing out that the total number of women physics professors in England doubled when she gained the appointment.
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