Walker is a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist with research interests in the
origin of life. She seeks to develop new theories of physics to explain what life is, how it emerged, and what signs of life might look like on other planets. She is currently working on developing new technology to detect possible signs of life with NASA as a Principle Investigator for their Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research (iCAR). She uses mathematical models to investigate chemical evolution and the development of networks on Prebiotic Earth. She looks at information flow in biotic and abiotic systems to further define life and its
emergence. Some of the highlights of her work in this field so far are:
The origin of homochirality Walker has studied the possible mechanisms of the origin of
homochirality, which is a key problem in the origin of life. In her research she has used several models such as the Sandars polymerization model, the
Langevin equation, and the activation-polymerization-epimerization-depolymerization (APED) model to imitate potential prebiotic conditions for autocatalytic polymerization networks. Walker
et al. discovered that only networks with long polymers show potential to produce significant spontaneous asymmetrical chirality in speculative early Earth conditions. It was shown that in biological systems the components are subordinate to the whole, in what is called top-down causation. They also determined that living systems have a separation of data from machinery, and non-trivial replication. Walker has shown theoretically how the occurrence of these biotic traits in an abiotic system present a possible framework for the origin of life. ==Public engagement==