Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Chris Impey chaired by Simon Ings

Astronomers Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Professor Chris Impey discuss how efforts to bring thinking from a greater diversity of backgrounds can enhance astronomy and provide insight into the universe and the search for life in space.

Bell Burnell is a well-known astrophysicist who discovered the first pulsars whilst studying at university.  She is a former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and of the Institute of Physics. Her writing is included in a new anthology The Sky is for Everyone: Women Astronomers in their Own Words. She has written about the challenges she has faced as a woman astronomer and about the need for greater diversity in astronomy. At Cambridge, she discovered pulsars, a previously unidentified type of star. The subsequent Nobel Prize went to her male supervisor. She later used the award of the £2.3 million US Breakthrough Prize to institute the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund to encourage greater diversity in physics by assisting PhD physics students from underrepresented groups.

Impey is a US-based astronomer who has written award-winning popular science books including Beyond: The Future of Space Travel and Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes. In his latest, Worlds without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity, he looks at astrobiology and the prospect of humans living on another planet. And he asks whether space could provide salvation for a human race facing existential threats here on Earth. Impey has written widely on observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars, and his research has been supported by $20 million in research grants in the US. He has also written a novel, Shadow World.

Discussions are chaired by novelist, science writer and Telegraph contributor Simon Ings, author of Engineers of Human Souls: Four Writers Who Changed Twentieth-Century Minds.

Owen Mumford Ltd are supporters of the festival’s science and medicine programme and the festival’s annual award for science and innovation.