famous scientists of England
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Answer:
Maggie Aderin-Pocock
Birthplace: London, England (1968)
Field: Astronomy
The first scientist on our list is also the youngest (although Brian Cox was born less than a week earlier). Maggie Aderin-Pocock is perhaps best known for hosting the current incarnation of long-running BBC series The Sky at Night, but she's not just a TV personality: she is an Honorary Research Associate in UCL's Department of Physics and Astronomy, and she's worked on a wide variety of projects over the course of her career, from developing landmine detection devices to managing the observation instruments for the Aeolus satellite.
Aderin-Pocock is also the Director of Science Innovation Ltd, an organisation that works to engage school-aged children in the field of space science.
Tim Berners-Lee
Birthplace: London, England (1955)
Fields: Engineering, Computer Science
If you've heard of Tim Berners-Lee, it's probably because he's the man who invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Without his world-changing work, you might not be reading this article right now!
But TimBL, as he's sometimes known, hasn't been resting on his laurels during the intervening three decades. He has worked with the UK government to help keep online information open and accessible, and he's been a key voice in the ongoing fight to preserve net neutrality.
James Black
Birthplace: Uddingston, Scotland (1924)
Field: Pharmacology
James Black won a scholarship to the University of St Andrews at the age of 15, and graduated from the university's prestigious School of Medicine - the oldest in Scotland - in 1946. In another life, he might have gone on to be a doctor, but he decided against this career path because he objected to the insensitive way in which patients were treated at the time.
Instead, Sir James Black is best known for developing propranolol and cimetidine, which are still used to treat heart disease and stomach ulcers respectively. He was knighted in 1981 and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1988.
Brian Cox
Birthplace: Oldham, England (1968)
Field: Physics
Professor Brian Cox is something of a household name these days, but in the grand scheme of things, it really hasn't been that long since the most notable entry on his CV was playing keyboards for D:Ream (on whose biggest hit, 'Things Can Only Get Better', he didn't even feature!).
It was during his music career that Cox completed a degree in physics at the University of Manchester. After that, he went on to get a PhD in particle physics, and nowadays he can be seen / heard on all sorts of science-themed TV and radio programmes. He has also co-authored a number of physics books, and he works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
Speaking of which...
Lyn Evans
Birthplace: Aberdare, Wales (1945)
Field: Physics
Lyn Evans, nicknamed 'Evans the Atom', was the project leader of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland until 2008. He actually spent his first year at Swansea University studying chemistry, only switching to physics in his second year because - rather amusingly - he found physics easier.
Evans has been honoured with a number of science awards since stepping down as LHC project leader, including the Glazebrook Medal, the 2012 Special Fundamental Physics Prize, and the IEEE Simon Ramo Medal.
Rosalind Franklin
Birthplace: London, England (1920)
Field: Chemistry
In 1951, Rosalind Franklin - already an accomplished X-ray crystallographer - became a research associate at King's College London. Famously, her work at King's would prove crucial to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule that holds the genetic instructions for the growth and reproduction of every organism on planet Earth.
Franklin sadly died of ovarian cancer at just 37 years old. She was not nominated for a Nobel Prize in her lifetime, although her colleagues Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962, once DNA structure had been widely accepted as proven science. To this day, there is still debate over the degree to