Dr. Belinda Wilkes

Biography

Belinda Wilkes is a Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellow at the University of Bristol's School of Physics. She completed her B.Sc.(Hons.) in Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews in 1978 and earned her PhD in 1982 with a focus on optical observations of broad emission lines in high-redshift active galaxies at Cambridge University. After her doctoral studies, she worked at the Steward Observatory, University of Arizona as a NATO SERC Postdoctoral Fellow and later as a staff Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) until 2004, where she was promoted to Senior Astrophysicist and continued until 2020. Wilkes has significant experience in multi-wavelength studies of quasars, investigating the energy generation mechanisms, spectral energy distributions, and the relationship between emission lines and the ionizing continuum shape. Her current research interests include the observations and studies of radio-loud samples, the effects of feedback from central supermassive black holes, and soft X-ray spectra in quasars. She also served as faculty at Harvard University's Summer School and directed NASA's Chandra X-ray Center during her time at SAO. Since relocating to the UK in 2020, she has taken on the Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellowship with an astrophysics theme.

Research Interests