Since 1991 she has been Professor of Physics and Chair of the Department of Physics in the UK's largest university, The Open University. In 1999 - 2000 she is at Princeton University, USA, on leave from The Open University.

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 part- time while raising a family. She has chaired, served on, or serviced more Research Council Boards, Committees and Panels that she wishes to remember, and has also chaired a European Community Committee. On completion of a term as Vice-President of the Royal Astronomical Society she was elected to the Council of the Open University.

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. From time to time she can be found in Hawaii - panting for breath at 14000' and using the UK's infrared or millimetre telescopes.

The Oppenheimer prize, the Michelson medal and the Tinsley prize 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 universities have conferred honorary doctorates on her, and she holds an Honorary Fellowship in New Hall, her former Cambridge College. She was made a CBE in 1999.

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 1995 she was awarded the Jansky Lecturership in the USA and in 1999 tours Australia giving the Women in Physics Lecture. She has helped plan the Edinburgh International Science Festival for a number of years, and is delighted by its success.

Her appointment to the Open University chair doubled the number of female professors of physics in the UK. She hopes that her presence there will encourage more women to feel that physics is for them.

In her spare time she walks, gardens, sews, swims and knits, listens to choral music and is active in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

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Last updated 30 March 1999: Maintained by: ian.newman@utas.edu.au