Emily Winterburn is a British science writer, physicist and historian of science based in Yorkshire. She is a visiting Fellow at the University of Leeds. Among other books, she wrote The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel, published by The History Press in 2017.
Emily Winterburn | |
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Alma mater | University of Manchester Imperial College London |
Notable works | The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel (2017) The Stargazer's Guide The Astronomers Royal |
Early life and education
Winterburn studied physics at the University of Manchester. She remained there to complete a Masters in the History of Science, focussing on Ernest Rutherford and the Manchester physics department between 1907 and 1919.[1]
Career
Winterburn joined the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, as a curator looking after astrophysical objects collected from 1250 to the present day.[1] Whilst at the Royal Observatory, Winterburn published The Astronomers Royal.[2] She appeared on Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time in 2007, discussing optics.[3] Alongside curating, Winterburn began a PhD at Imperial College London, studying the Herschel family.[1] In 2011 she submitted her PhD thesis, The Herschels: a scientific family in training.[4] Her thesis was well received by the historical science communities.[5]
In 2009 Winterburn joined the University of Leeds Museum of Science as a curator.[6][1] That year she published The Stargazer's Guide: How to Read Our Night Sky with HarperCollins.[7] Winterburn is an expert on the Herschel family and Islamic astronomical instruments.[1] She won the 2014 Notes & Records of the Royal Society essay prize for her essay Philomaths, Herschel, and the myth of the self-taught man.[8] She was part of the 2015 Royal Society celebration for International Women's Day, where she discussed girls' participation in scientific education and society.[9][10] She contributed to the Springer Publishing book The Scientific Legacy of William Herschel.[11] Winterburn has also written for popular periodicals, including Astronomy Now magazine.
Having published extensively on the Herschel family, Winterburn began to write The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel in 2012.[12][13] The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel focuses on the ten most productive years of Caroline Herschel's academic career, working with her brother William Herschel's telescope and finding comets.[14] The book was published in 2017 and has been described as a "terrific read".[15][16]