Science Centre Singapore
and
British High Commission
and
National University of Singapore
cordially invite you to
Science in the Café
on Thursday, 26 February 2009 at 7:00pm
to be held in
The Maxwell Auditorium
Science Centre Singapore
with
Prof S Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Visiting Professor
University of Oxford
who will explain
What’s Going On In The Universe?
Science Centre Singapore thanks the British High Commission and National University of Singapore for bringing this learning opportunity to all of us.
Attendance is free of charge but pre-registration is required.
Reservations are accepted on a first-come-first-served basis due to limited seating.
Please make your requisite reservations online through http://www.science.edu.sg/ssc/CafeMain.htm
a minimum of 2 days before the event – to assist us in our catering & seating plans.
We will retain your e-mail addresses only so that we may inform you of future Science Centre events & activities. If you wish to have your address removed from our list, please inform us. Thank you.
What’s Going On In The Universe?
Why is Pluto no longer a planet? The process that led to the reclassification of Pluto will be discussed, as will some of the big topics that are engaging professional astronomers today such as dark matter and dark energy.
Professor S Jocelyn Bell Burnell
After 3 years as Dean of Science at the University of Bath, Prof Bell ‘retired’ in 2004 and moved to a Visiting Professorship at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellowship at Mansfield College, Oxford. For 10 years, she was Professor of Physics at the Open University and had a year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Princeton University, USA.
She started her academic career by failing the Northern Ireland equivalent of the 11+. After gaining a creditable number of O and A levels, she went on to read a Physics degree at Glasgow University, Scotland. This was followed by a PhD in Cambridge (UK) in Radio Astronomy. During her time there, she was involved in the discovery of pulsars, opening up a new branch of astrophysics – work which was recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor.
Marriage to a peripatetic husband meant she worked subsequently at the University of Southampton (in gamma ray astronomy) and at University College London (in X-ray astronomy) before returning to Scotland in the early 80’s to a job in infrared astronomy at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. Latterly, she held a management job there, running the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii as a facility for astronomers in British, Canadian and Dutch universities. For most of this period, she worked parttime while raising a family. She has chaired, served on, or serviced more Research Council Boards, Committees and Panels than she wishes to remember, and has also chaired a European Community Committee. She has been the President of the Royal Astronomical Society.
She has used telescopes flown on high-altitude balloons, launched on rockets and carried on satellites, and built a radio telescope which was firmly grounded in Cambridgeshire. Later in her career, she could be found in Hawaii panting for breath at 14,000 feet (above sea level) and using the UK’s infrared or millimetre waveband telescopes.
The Oppenheimer prize, the Michelson medal, the Tinsley prize and the Magellanic Premium have been awarded to her by learned bodies in the US, and the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society has presented her with the Herschel Medal. UK and US universities have conferred honorary doctorates on her, and she holds an Honorary Fellowship in New Hall, Cambridge. She was made a CBE in 1999 and in that year also won the Edinburgh Medal for services to science and society. She became an FRS in 2003, and FRSE in 2004 and was elected a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2005. In 2007, she was made a DBE, and in 2008 became the first female President of the Institute of Physics.
The public appreciation and understanding of science have always been important to her, and she is much in demand as a speaker and broadcaster. In 1999, she toured Australia giving the “Women in Physics” Lecture. Her appointment to the Open University doubled the number of female professors of physics in the UK. She hopes that her presence as a senior woman in science will encourage more women to consider a career in science.
In her spare time, she walks, gardens, listens to choral music and is active in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
This event is organised by various agencies as an activity in the International Year of Astronomy 2009