She is an associate professor at Rice University and a Sloan Research Fellow.

[4] As a child she made a letter frequency table from her children's dictionary,[1] and as a high school student, seeking a way to "do logic puzzles all day and get paid for this",[2] she was already planning a career as a mathematics professor.

Her dissertation, On Degenerations and Deformations of Sklyanin Algebras,[6] was jointly supervised by Toby Stafford [de] and Karen E. Smith,[7] and based in part on her work as a visiting student at the University of Manchester, where Stafford had moved.

[8] Walton did postdoctoral research at the University of Washington and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and became a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012 to 2015.

[8] She came to Temple University as Selma Lee Bloch Brown Assistant Professor of Mathematics in 2015 [1].