Fiona Watt

Fiona Watt, FRS is a British scientist who is internationally known for detailing the mechanisms that control epidermal stem cell renewal, differentiation, and tissue aggregation. She is also known for discovering how each of those processes' regulations are removed in diseased cells. She became the first woman president of the International Society of Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) in 2008, and has advocated on behalf of women in science. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003, and she has held the position of Deputy Director at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research. She received her Doctorate of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 1979 from the University of Oxford, and as of 2013, she became involved with the Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Initiative which began with a project known as HipSci. HipSci is a collaboration of many researchers at Wellcome Trust that are generating and characterizing a large collection of human induced pluripotent stem cells to discover how genomic variation affects cellular phenotype and to identify new mechanisms of disease.

Fiona Watt knew she wanted to be a scientist from a very young age. She even had her own lab coat in which she pretended she was a chemist, playing with her chemistry set. She is so passionate about her career that she was quoted saying, "I think that being a scientist is in a sense hardwired, and there are people who just couldn't conceive of being anything else."

Fiona Watt obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences in 1976, and her Masters degree in 1979, both from Cambridge University, U.K, where she was the only female graduate student in her department. She also obtained her Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) from the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford in 1979, naming her thesis "Microtubule-organizing centers in cells in culture and in hybrids derived from them". Professor Watt, then, completed a two-year postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, with Dr. Howard Green. Upon returning to the UK, she founded her first lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in London where she became Head of the Molecular Cell Biology Laboratory, and in 1987, relocated to the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute where, until 2006, she served as Head of the Keratinocyte Laboratory. Currently, Watt is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Cambridge, Deputy Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research - University of Cambridge, and also Deputy Director of Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute (formerly known as the Imperial Cancer Research Fund). She is a member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), Academy of Medical Sciences fellow, and Royal Society fellow.

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