Radio astronomer, born in Belfast, NE Northern Ireland, UK. She attended school in York and went on to study at Glasgow and Cambridge. In 1967 she was a research student at Cambridge working with Antony Hewish when she noticed an unusually regular signal, shown to be bursts of radio energy at a constant interval of just over a second - the first identified pulsar. After 1982 she worked as a senior research fellow at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh and was appointed to the chair in physics at the Open University in 1997. In 2003 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Born in Northern Ireland, her father was an architect for the nearby Armagh Planetarium.
At eleven, she failed the 11+ exam and her parents sent her to The Mount, a Quaker girls' boarding school in York, England. There she was impressed by a physics teacher who taught her:
Bell Burnell later attended the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge.
After finishing her PhD, Bell Burnell worked at the University of Southampton, University College London and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, before becoming Professor of Physics at the Open University for ten years, and then a visiting professor at Princeton University. Before retiring Bell Burnell was Dean of Science at the University of Bath between 2001 and 2004, and was President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004.
Although she (famously) did not share the Nobel Prize with Hewish for her discovery, she has been honored by many other organizations. Tinsley Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Magellanic Premium of the American Philosophical Society, the Jansky Lectureship of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, and is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
She is the house patron of Burnell House at Cambridge House Grammar School in Ballymena, Northern Ireland.
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