Dr. James Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he began his independent career in the fall of 2019. He received both his master’s and PhD degrees in chemistry from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, before joining the group of Danna Freedman in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University (now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 2015. As a postdoc, he worked on the high-pressure synthesis of novel transition metal–bismuth binary compounds, collaborating with Steve Jacobsen in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences as well as staff members at the the Advanced Photon Source and the National Synchrotron Light Source II.

In his independent research, James and his group pursue a range of research topics centered around high pressure science, including the synthesis of novel transition metal carbides, the exploration of magnetically frustrated inorganic systems, the in situ collection of X-ray diffraction during shock compression, and the use of data-driven computational methods to examine the stability of chemical disorder at high pressure.