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Murray Edwards College, Cambridge

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  • Jocelyn Bell Burnell
    Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS FRSE FRAS FInstP (/bɜːrˈnɛl/; née Bell; born 15 July 1943) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radi...
  • Judith Dunn
    Judith Frances Dunn, FBA, FMedSci (born 1939) is a British psychologist and academic, who specialises in social developmental psychology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Edwards_College,_Cambridge

Murray Edwards College is a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge. It was founded as "New Hall" in 1954, and unlike many other colleges, it was founded without a benefactor and did not bear a benefactor's name. This situation changed in 2008. Following a donation of £30 million by alumna Ros Edwards (née Smith) and her husband Steve Edwards, New Hall was renamed Murray Edwards College, honouring the donors and the first President, Dame Rosemary Murray.

New Hall was founded in 1954, housing sixteen students in Silver Street where Darwin College now stands. This was at a time when Cambridge had the lowest proportion of women undergraduates of any university in the United Kingdom, and when only two other colleges (Girton and Newnham) admitted female students.

In 1962, members of the Darwin family gave their home, "The Orchard", to the College. This new site was located on Huntingdon Road, about a mile from the centre of Cambridge. The architects chosen were Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who are known for their design of the Barbican in London, and fundraising commenced. The building work began in 1964 and was completed in 1965. The new college could house up to 300 students.

In 1967, one of the College's PhD students, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a researcher in the university radio astronomy group, discovered the first four pulsars, leading to a Nobel Prize for her supervisor, and for Jocelyn Bell-Burnell herself, ultimately a position as a Research Professor at the University of Oxford.

In 1975, the College's President Dame Rosemary Murray became the first woman to hold the post of Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Since then, two subsequent presidents, Anne Lonsdale and Jennifer Barnes, have become Pro-Vice-Chancellors of the University of Cambridge.

Men-only Cambridge colleges were converted into mixed colleges in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 2007 announcement that Oxford University's last remaining women-only college, St Hilda's, would admit men, Cambridge is the only university in the United Kingdom that partially maintains a female-only student admissions policy, represented by Newnham College, Murray Edwards College, and Lucy Cavendish College.[8][9] The fellowship and staff at Murray Edwards College are nevertheless recruited from both sexes