New Ulster Bank £50 bank note features Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

A new bank note celebrates some of the amazing things women from Northern Ireland have achieved, including Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s iconic 1967 discovery of pulsars – spherical, compact objects that are about the size of a large city but contain more mass than the sun.

Ulster Bank’s new polymer £50 note is the latest in a series of vertically oriented notes launched by the bank featuring people and places in Northern Ireland. A big focus of the new note is industry including aerospace, ship building, linen mills, and the film industry. The design of the new £50 note heavily features women working in NI’s burgeoning life sciences industry as well.

On the other side of the note, there is a range of flora and fauna found in NI, including a pine martin, a cryptic wood butterfly, and gorse, whose thorny spines make it a corridor and safe haven for wildlife.

Sandra Wright, Senior HR Manager at Ulster Bank added:

“The note designs are a celebration of the people and places of Northern Ireland, building on the designs of our £5, £10 and £20 notes. But this new note has a particular focus on women and women’s role in life and industry here, including amazing achievements such as Dame Jocelyn Bell’s discovery of pulsars.”

We named this website in honour of Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell who, as a postgraduate student, co-discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. She was credited with “one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century”.

The discovery was recognised by the award of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, but despite the fact that she was the first to observe the pulsars, Bell was not one of the recipients of the prize.

In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to give the whole of the £2.3 million prize money to help female, minority, and refugee students seeking to become physics researchers, the funds to be administered by the Institute of Physics. The resulting bursary scheme is known as the “Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund“.