Bernard Pagel

Bernard Ephraim Julius Pagel FRS (4 January 1930 – 14 July 2007) was a British astrophysicist who worked on the measurement and interpretation of elemental abundances in stars and galaxies.

The son of physician and medical historian Walter Pagel and grandson of German physician Julius Leopold Pagel, he was born in Berlin in 1930, but moved with his family to Britain in 1933 to avoid the growing Jewish persecution in Germany at that time.

He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School in Northwood and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with first-class honours in physics in 1950.

In 1956, he moved to the Royal Greenwich Observatory at Herstmonceux Castle, where he spent the greater part of his career, eventually progressing to the grade of deputy chief scientific officer.

Upon his retirement from the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1990, he moved to a chair at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA) in Copenhagen.