The Oxford and Cambridge Society of Ireland invites alumni to their 11th annual dinner at the Westbury Hotel.

Join the Society at 7pm for a drinks reception and hear from guest speaker Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. 

Dress code: Black tie (University blazers welcome)

About Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

She was born in Lurgan and attended primary school there before proceeding to the Mount School, York. She recalls, "it was assumed that the girls would do domestic science and the boys would do science, and I wasn't too happy with that".  Thankfully she turned her back on domestic science and took on the male-dominated world of astrophysics.

Upon obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Glasgow in 1965 she went to New Hall, Cambridge to study for a PhD, working on quasars with Anthony Hewish. While collecting data with a new telescope that she had helped to build, she found an unexpected signal. She had discovered the stellar radio source that was later recognised as a pulsar. Her exclusion from the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, which went in part to her supervisor, Antony Hewish, for his role in the discovery, has been the subject of controversy ever since. But that is about the only prize in science that she hasn’t won. 

Since then her achievements have been recognised the world over. She has been President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the first female President of both the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She is a former pro-chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College, and she is Chancellor of the University of Dundee. She received a CBE in 1999 and a DBE in 2007 for her services to astronomy. In 2018 she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her landmark work on pulsars and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community. Winning this prize was impressive, but not as remarkable as what she chose to do with the $3million prize fund. She has donated it all to the Institute of Physics to fund PhD studentships for those under-represented in science: female, black and minority ethnic and refugee researchers. Her actions speed louder than words.