Northern Irish astrophysicist Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has received the Ulysses Medal, University College Dublin’s highest honour, presented by UCD President Professor Orla Feely in recognition of her scientific achievements and her support for future generations of researchers.
In 1967, as a PhD student at Cambridge, Bell Burnell discovered radio pulsars, rapidly spinning remnants of exploded stars, opening a new field of research. The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics went to her supervisor and another scientist, and her exclusion is often cited as an example of the under-recognition of women in science.
In 2018 she donated the £2.3 million she received from the Breakthrough Prize to set up a fund supporting students from under-represented backgrounds; at UCD, a PhD researcher is studying biomedical optics thanks to one of these scholarships. The medal, created in 2005, honours James Joyce and has previously gone to figures such as Geoffrey Hinton and Margaret Atwood.
