Dr. Jonelle Walsh

Biography

Jonelle Walsh is an Associate Professor at Texas A&M University in the College of Arts and Sciences. Originally from Massachusetts, she received a BA in Physics from Bowdoin College in 2005 and earned her PhD in Physics from the University of California, Irvine in 2011. During her graduate studies, she was awarded the NSF Astronomy Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she held at the University of Texas at Austin for three years. In fall 2017, she joined the Texas A&M faculty as a Mitchell Postdoctoral Fellow in Astronomy. Her research primarily focuses on observational extragalactic astronomy, specifically investigating the relationship between supermassive black holes and the galaxies they host. She studies the motions of stars and gas in the centers of nearby galaxies to understand how black holes grow and influence their surroundings. Her work utilizes data from high-resolution observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck and Gemini telescopes, employing adaptive optics as well as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. These observations are complemented by computational models developed with advanced research computing resources.

Research Interests