Professor of Mathematics
Rice University, Houston
Chelsea Walton’s 2011 PhD, “On Degenerations and Deformations of Sklyanin Algebras,” was jointly supervised by Toby Stafford and Karen Smith. After graduation, she spent a year as an NSF post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2011-2012 and a semester at MSRI for the Spring 2013 program on Noncommutative Algebraic Geometry and Representation Theory, before settling into her position as a Moore Instructor at MIT, working with Pavel Etingof as her mentor.
Dr. Walton joined the faculty at Rice in 2020, after three years at UIUC. Before that she was a Selma Lee Bloch Brown Early Career Assistant Professor at Temple University.
Chelsea Walton is a Michigan product through and through: born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, she attended Detroit Public Schools for secondary and most of her elementary education. She earned her BS with High Honors in Mathematics from Michigan State University in 2005, where Jeanne Wald was an important mentor before moving to Ann Arbor for Michigan’s Math PhD program. During graduate school, she spend three semesters at the University of Manchester in the UK, after her adviser Toby Stafford moved there in Fall 2007.
In addition to her wdely acclaimed research in non-commutative algebra and representation theory, Dr. Walton is very involved in mentoring students. Her interest goes back to an alternate spring break program in Puebla, Mexico and a Race Relations summer study abroad program in South Africa she participated in as an undergraduate. As a postdoc, she taught for the EDGE (Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education) program for four consecutive summers, 2012-2015. She was also the coordinator from 2012-2014 for PRIMES Circle, a high-school enrichment program at MIT for underrepresented groups in the Boston area.
She has been recognized with the Recent Alumni Award from the College of Natural Science at Michigan State University, the Infinite Kilometer (Infinite K) Award for outreach from the School of Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Wirt and Mary Cornwell Prize in Mathematics from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Walton shares that she “grew up not having any clue what a Mathematician was… so I looked up and wrote to random Math Professors. It sounds silly, but this actually helped shape my career path. Doing math for a living is a sweet gig, and I am deeply grateful to be a part of the mathematics community.”