Jocelyn Bell Burnell is currently Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College. Since leaving Cambridge in 1968 she has studied the sky in almost every region of the electromagnetic spectrum and gained an unusual breadth of experience. She became a full-time professor at the Open University in 1991 (doubling the number of women who were full time professors of physics in the UK) and was Dean of Science at the University of Bath between 1997 and 2004.She is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was recently elected a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. She has just completed a term as (the first female) President of the Institute of Physics.

Professor Bell Burnell directs many of her efforts towards the advancement of astronomy (and of women in astronomy) and is deeply involved in teaching and public understanding of physics and astronomy. For several years she was Chair of PPARC’s Public Understanding of Science and Technology Advisory Panel, undertakes overseas tours for the British Council and appears regularly on the media. She is a role mol for women in science, a committed Quaker and commands the respect and admiration of both the scientific and general public, many of whom who are aware of her singular achievements through the many books which have described her discovery of pulsars and her subsequent career.