British astrophysicist, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, has been awarded a £2.3million special Breakthrough prize in physics for her work in pulsars – a discovery, for which she was previously ignored by the Nobel institute.
Spurred by her own experience, Dame Bell Burnell is donating the money to the Institute of Physics to fund PhD studentships for underrepresented groups. These funds will not only go towards helping women in their journery to become physics researchers, but also ethnic minorities and refugee students.
The discovery
During her observations of a radio telescope, Dame Bell Burnell, noticed a strange signal – repeating pulses of radio waves. “It was a very, very small signal,” Dame Bell Burnell said. “It occupied about one part in 100,000 of the three miles of chart data that I had.”
She took her findings to her PhD supervisor, Antony Hewish, who believed the signals to be artificial radio interference. However, after gathering more evidence, she identified three more repeating pulses from different areas in the galaxy. The signals were spinning neutron stars, or pulsars, which release beams of radio waves as they turn.
Despite making the discovery, it was Hewish that was awarded the Nobel prize for the pulsar work.
Since then, Dame Bell Burnell became the first female president for the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, along with helping set up the Athena Swan scheme, which aims to improve the lives of women in academia. Although she believes the programme is helping towards a sea change in unconscious bias she deems that “more needs to be done”.
She believes her pulsar discovery was owed - in part - to her minority status. "I found pulsars because I was a minority person and feeling a bit overawed 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.
"I have this hunch," she added, "that minority folk bring a fresh angle on things and that is often a very productive thing. In general, a lot of breakthroughs come from left field."
