Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a Northern Irish physicist who, while conducting research for her doctorate in 1967, discovered the pulsar. The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized this discovery, but the prize went to her supervisor Antony Hewish (jointly with Martin Ryle); she was not among its recipients, an omission that remains one of the most discussed credit disputes in twentieth-century physics. She later served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004 and president of the Institute of Physics from 2008 to 2010. In 2018 she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and directed the three million dollar prize toward a fund to help female, minority and refugee students become research physicists.