British astronomer. As a research assistant at the University of Cambridge, she assisted in constructing a large radio telescope and discovered pulsars, cosmic sources of peculiar radio pulses, providing the first direct evidence for the existence of rapidly spinning neutron stars. The 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for the discovery of pulsars to Antony Hewish (Hewish, Antony) (her adviser) and Martin Ryle (Ryle, Sir Martin), sparking a controversy over the omission of Bell Burnell. She subsequently became a professor at the Open University, dean of science at the University of Bath, and vice president of the Royal Astronomical Society.