July is SPECTRUM Month
Spotlight Scientists
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943 - Present)
Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who got her BS in Natural Philosophy (i.e. Physics) from the University of Glasgow, and went on to get her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1969. She is known for discovering the first signs of radio pulsars in 1967, which garnered her research advisor Antony Hewish the Nobel Prize in Physics, but she was not awarded it herself. This caused a large controversy over her not receiving the award despite playing one of the largest roles in the discovery, but she herself has defended the decision. She also received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics thanks to her work, which included a prize sum of £2.3 million, of which she all gave away to female and minority students wanting to become researchers in physics. In addition to this work, she has also served as the President of a few different physics societies over the years, including the Royal Astronomical Society (from 2002 - 2004) and the Institute of Physics (from 2008 - 2010).
C. V. Raman (1888 - 1970)
Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was an Indian physicist who worked heavily in the field of light scattering. He and his student worked together to formulate the idea of Raman scattering, wherein it was seen that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the light that is deflected changes wavelength and amplitude. When he won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics, he became the first Asian person to receive a Nobel Prize in any scientific branch. His work in light scattering started the field of Raman Spectroscopy, which was the basis to work that determined the spin of photons in 1932. He was also the paternal uncle of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his work in the evolution of stars.
Dorothy Hodgkin (1910 - 1994)
Dr. Dorothy Hodgkin was a chemist whose work confirming the structure of penicillin and vitamin B earned her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964. Her work in X-ray crystallography in determining biomolecule structures also was an essential tool in structural biology. She was one of only two women allowed to study Chemistry in her grammar school in England, and attended the University of Oxford to further her studies. When she graduated, she became the third woman to graduate with a first class honors degree from the University of Oxford. She continued her education at Cambridge for her doctoral program, with her thesis in X-ray crystallography. While she was a tutor at Oxford, one of her students was actually the soon-to-be Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. After Thatcher was in office, there was a portrait of Hodgkin hung at Downing Street out of respect for Hodgkin.
The men and women in our spotlight changed the course of science over and over. However, there are uncountable more that accelerated our progress further.
To learn more about these incredible people, follow the links below:
Nancy Grace Roman: NASA, Wikipedia, AAUW
Riccardo Giacconi: Nobel Prize, Wikipedia
Donna Strickland: Nobel Prize, Wikipedia, OSA