Krista S. Walton

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Krista Shereé Walton (born c. 1977) is an American chemical engineer and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the Robert "Bud" Moeller Faculty Fellow, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and the associate vice president for research operations and infrastructure at Georgia Tech. Walton grew up on a family farm in Killen, Alabama, and graduated from Brooks High School in 1995. She earned a B.S.E. in chemical and materials engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2000 and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 2005 under M. Douglas LeVan. After a postdoctoral stint at Northwestern University with Randall Q. Snurr (2005–2006), she began her faculty career at Kansas State University in 2006, where she won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2007.

Walton moved to Georgia Tech in 2009 as an assistant professor, earned tenure in 2012, and was promoted to full professor in 2016. She founded Georgia Tech’s DOE Energy Frontier Research Center UNCAGE-ME in 2014 and led its renewal in 2018. She serves as an associate editor for Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research (since 2014) and has been active in AIChE’s Separations Division for many years. Walton has held leadership roles including treasurer of the International Adsorption Society (2010–2015) and co-chair of FOA14 (2022). In 2020 she joined the Defense Science Study Group for a two-year term. She was associate dean for research in the College of Engineering (2019–2023) and is now associate vice president for research operations and infrastructure. Her research focuses on designing porous materials for chemical separations, including CO2 capture, air purification, natural gas upgrading, and atmospheric water harvesting, with an emphasis on adsorption in complex mixtures and the structure–property relationships of metal-organic frameworks. Walton has mentored about 30 Ph.D. students, published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, contributed book chapters, and co-authored a chapter in the 9th edition of Perry’s Chemical Engineers’ Handbook. She regularly presents at conferences and seminars.