She was born in northern Ireland the fifteenth of July of nineteen forty three. Her father was the architect who designed the Armagh Planetarium. She went to Lurgan college, where girls were not able to study science. Her parents protested against the school´s policy and her parents sent her to The Mount School, York ,Quaker girls' boarding school. There she was favorably impressed by her physics teacher, Mr. Tillott. As Jocelyn point of view , he was a really good teacher who showed her how easy physics were.

She graduated at Glasgow University with a Bachelor of science degree in Natural Philosophy in 1965 and obtained a Ph. D. degree from the University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, she attended Murray Edwards College and worked with Antony Hewish and others to construct a radio telescope for using interplanetary scintillation to study quasars, which had recently been discovered . In 1967, she detected a bit of "scruff" on her chart - recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars.