Chelsea Walton
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Chelsea Walton | |
|---|---|
 Walton at Oberwolfach in 2014 | |
| Born | 1983 (age 42–43) Detroit, Michigan, U.S. |
| Alma mater | |
| Awards | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Rice University |
| Thesis | On Degenerations and Deformations of Sklyanin Algebras (2011) |
| Doctoral advisors | |
| Website | math |
Chelsea Walton is an American mathematician whose research interests include noncommutative algebra, noncommutative algebraic geometry, symmetry in quantum mechanics, Hopf algebras, and quantum groups. She is a full professor at Rice University and a Sloan Research Fellow.[1]
Walton is African-American,[2] originally from Detroit, Michigan,[3] and was educated in the Detroit public schools.[4] As a child she made a letter frequency table from her children's dictionary,[1] and as a high school student, seeking a way to "do logic puzzles all day and get paid for this",[2] she was already planning a career as a mathematics professor.[3]
She graduated from Michigan State University in 2005,[5] and completed her PhD at the University of Michigan in 2011. Her dissertation, On Degenerations and Deformations of Sklyanin Algebras,[6] was jointly supervised by Toby Stafford and Karen E. Smith,[7] and based in part on her work as a visiting student at the University of Manchester, where Stafford had moved.[8]
Walton did postdoctoral research at the University of Washington and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and became a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012 to 2015.[8] She came to Temple University as Selma Lee Bloch Brown Assistant Professor of Mathematics in 2015 [1]. She moved to the University of Illinois in 2018.[5][4] She joined the faculty at Rice University in 2020.[9]
Recognition
Walton was named a Sloan Fellow in 2017, becoming the fourth African-American to win a Sloan Fellowship in mathematics.[1] Walton was also recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2017 Honoree.[2] In 2018 she won the André Lichnerowicz Prize in Poisson geometry, the first woman to be awarded this prize.[10] The award citation noted her research on Sklyanin algebras in Poisson geometry, on the actions of Hopf algebras, and on the universal enveloping algebra of the Witt algebra.[11] She was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, in the 2025 class of fellows.[12]
