Dr. Walsh taught and also oversaw 16 Ph.D courses for various students, including one who would later go on herself to teach acclaimed British physicist and maker of documentaries, Brian Cox.
[citation needed] In 1953 he started studying for a PhD from Jodrell Bank, supervised by Robert Hanbury Brown, where he constructed a 92MHz receiver for the Transit Telescope.
He worked for Ferranti for a short time, before moving to the University of Michigan[1] in 1959[citation needed] to teach and to research low-frequency radio emission in the ionosphere, for which he used sounding rockets.
He returned to the University of Manchester in 1967 in order to work on atmospheric research using the Ariel 3 satellite, and to lead the "survey group", while supervising PhD students.
Walsh's spectroscopic follow-up of quasars in this survey led to the 1979 discovery of the first example of a gravitational lens, B0957+561, using an optical telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory.