Belinda Wilkes

Belinda J. Wilkes is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, and former director of the Chandra X-ray Center.
She was born in Staffordshire, England and grew up in Albrighton, Shropshire, attending Wolverhampton Girls' High School before obtaining a BSc.(Hons) in 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's Steward Observatory as a NATO postdoctoral fellow and in 1984 to SAO's High Energy Astrophysics Division, part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
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.
She is the author of over 165 papers in refereed science journals and has served on a wide range of professional committees as well as various user and advisory committees and review boards for space and ground-based telescopes. She is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and a member of the International Astronomical Union. 
In 2018 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, her Alma Mater. In 2020 she was named a fellow of the American Physical Society "for significant contributions to the understanding of active galactic nuclei, including their emission mechanisms and evolutionary pathways, and for innovative leadership of the Chandra X-ray Observatory". In 2021 she was named a fellow of the American Astronomical Society "For dedicated leadership of the astronomical community as director of the Chandra X-ray Center". 