Chelsea Walton

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 Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 2011. Her dissertation, On Degenerations and Deformations of Sklyanin Algebras,^[6] was jointly supervised by Toby Stafford [de] 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]

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]

• Diaz-Lopez, Alexander (February 2018), "Chelsea Walton Interview" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 65 (2): 164–166, doi:10.1090/noti1631

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