Fiona Watt

Fiona Watt obtained her first degree from Cambridge University, UK and her DPhil, in cell biology, from the University of Oxford, UK. She was a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she first began studying differentiation and tissue organisation in mammalian epidermis. She established her first research group at the Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology and then spent 20 years at the CRUK London Research Institute (now part of the Francis Crick Institute). She helped to establish the CRUK Cambridge Research Institute and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research and in 2012 she moved to King’s College London to found the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine. In 2018 she became Executive Chair of the Medical Research Council. Professor Watt is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her awards include the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) Women in Cell Biology Senior Award, the Hunterian Society Medal and the FEBS/EMBO Women in Science Award. In 2016 she was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. She is internationally recognised for her work on stem cells and their interactions with the niche in healthy and diseased skin.