About Me

Belinda J. Wilkes is a Research Associate, having retired as a Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, MA (USA). She served as Director of the Chandra X-ray Center from 2014-2020.

She is also a Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellow and an Honorary Professor (from 2024) at the School of Physics, University of Bristol, UK (2021-2025).

Dr. Wilkes was born in Staffordshire, England and grew up in Albrighton, Salop attending Wolverhampton Girls' High School before studying physics and astronomy at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland followed by a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Cambridge, England. In 1982, she moved to the University of Arizona as a NATO-SERC postdoctoral fellow, and in 1984  to SAO's High Energy Astrophysics Division.

Her research relates to multi-wavelength studies of quasars: galaxies containing super-massive black holes at their centers and the most luminous sources in the universe.