The Société Astronomique de France (the French Astronomical Society – SAF) has awarded its prestigious international astronomy prize – the Jules Janssen Prize – to Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a former President of the Royal Astronomical Society, for her scientific achievements, including the discovery of the first pulsar (CP 1919).
French astronomer Jules Janssen (1824-1907), who served as SAF's president between 1895 and 1897, created a number of awards, including the Jules Janssen Prize awarded annually by SAF since 1897. This prize is alternatively given to a French astronomer and a foreign astronomer for outstanding scientific work as well as for their contribution to public appreciation of astronomy.
Previous Prize recipients include, among others, Percival Lowell (1904), Max Wolf (1912), Arthur Stanley Eddington (1928), Robert Esnault-Pelterie (1930), Albert Einstein (1931), Michel Mayor (1998), Thérèse Encrenaz (2007), Catherine Cesarsky (2009), Françoise Combes (2017), Hubert Reeves (2019), and Ewine van Dishoeck (2020).
Prof Dame Bell Burnell inadvertently discovered pulsars as a doctoral candidate in radio astronomy at Cambridge, in the process opening a new branch of astrophysics – work recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her thesis supervisor. She went on to hold numerous positions in multiple branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family.
She is now a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford, and Chancellor of the University of Dundee. She was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, in 2008 became the first female President of the Institute of Physics, and in 2014 the first female President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was part of a small group of female scientists who created the Athena Swan programme.
She has received numerous honours, including the Breakthrough Prize of $3 million in 2018. Public appreciation and understanding of science have always been important to her, and she is in high demand as a lecturer and populariser of science. In her spare time, she gardens, listens to choir singing and has been an active Quaker. She co-edited an anthology of poetry with an astronomical theme – “Dark Matter: Poems from Space”.
Professor Mike Edmunds, the current President of the Royal Astronomical Society said: "I am delighted that our former President Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been the awarded the Jules Jansen prize. It honours a lifetime of dedicated work in science – including her well-known and crucial role in the discovery of pulsars and her passion in advancing the cause that science is for all in society."
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