early STEM education<\/a> as challenging. Despite her assurance that she wanted to study the stars surrounding our planet, her gender precluded her from engaging with STEM subjects in school, as they were aimed primarily at young men.<\/p>\nShe persevered, becoming one of only three young girls taking science in her secondary school, where she topped the class in physics and then continued on to the University of Glasgow and then Cambridge, where she undertook a PhD.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was at Cambridge where she worked on the development of a radio space telescope designed to explore the furthest reaches of space and where she discovered a \u201cscruff\u201d on one of the charts she was analysing. This was the moment she identified what would become known as a pulsating radio star, or pulsar.<\/p>\n
Despite her work however, Burnell was notably excluded when the discovery was recognised by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974. The prize was instead awarded to her PhD supervisor, Antony Hewish and a fellow Cambridge professor, Martin Ryle.<\/p>\n
Her exclusion stands as a prime example of how the achievements of women were so often disregarded in favour of their male co-workers and supervisors.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2018, she donated \u00a32.3m to start the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, a fund supporting students coming from underrepresented backgrounds. The money was part of the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics that she had earned for her previous discovery and five decades of leadership in the field.<\/p>\n
Prof Lorraine Hanlon , a full professor of astronomy at UCD, said Burnell had been \u201cpeerless in how she has deployed her brilliance, transforming her groundbreaking discovery into lifelong advocacy for curiosity-driven research, equity and global science diplomacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe achievements of all the Bell Burnell scholars stand as living proof of Dame Jocelyn\u2019s enduring legacy in recognising and empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief<\/a>, Silicon Republic\u2019s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The astrophysicist has a long legacy of scientific research, discovery and supporting the wider STEM community. Astrophysicist Jocelyn…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60],"class_list":["post-670403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}