Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943-) With the aid of a radio telescope she built herself, she became the first astronomer to detect pulsars rapidly spinning, extremely dense neutron stars. As a graduate student, she was deemed too inexperienced to receive the Nobel Prize, which was given instead in 1974 to her thesis adviser, Anthony Hewish, a man who later referred to her as "a jolly good girl [1] was just doing her job." She went on to be the first female president of the Institute of Physics. Now she is a visiting professor of astrophysics at the university of Oxford.