7 pm Tuesday, June 10th at the Holt Planetarium, Chambers Street, Napier

Many thanks to the Hawke’s Bay Astronomical Society for this lecture by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

Dame (Susan) Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS is a Northern Irish astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars while studying and advised by her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Martin Ryle.

Bell Burnell was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and was interim president in early 2011. In 1999 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Astronomy and promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2007.

In February 2013 she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4. In February 2014 she was made President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the first woman to hold that office. She is currently Visiting Professor of Astrophysics in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College.