Margaret Burbidge

Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey; 12 August 1919 – 5 April 2020) was a British-American observational astronomer and astrophysicist. In the 1950s, she was one of the founders of stellar nucleosynthesis and was first author of the influential BFH paper. During the 1960s and 1970s she worked on galaxy rotation curves and quasars, discovering the most distant astronomical object then known. In the 1980s and 1990s she helped develop and utilise the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Burbidge was also well known for her work opposing discrimination against women in astronomy while also opposing positive discrimination.

Burbidge held several leadership and administrative posts, including director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory (1973–1975), president of the American Astronomical Society (1976–1978), and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1983). Burbidge worked at the University of London Observatory, Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California San Diego (UCSD). From 1979 to 1988 she was the first director of the Center for Astronomy and Space Sciences at UCSD, where she worked from 1962 until her retirement.