Watts has been Professor of Social and Mathematical Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), University of London, and Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department for International Development since 2015.

In 2015, Watts was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci). In the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours, she was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) “for services to global health and international development”.

Watts founded the Gender Violence Research Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This team collaborated in 2012 with Liz Kelly and colleagues at the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University and Nicole Westmarland and her research team at Durham University’s Crime, Violence and Abuse group to assess the impact of community domestic violence perpetrator programmes on women and children’s safety, as well as investigating related questions such as which specific factors enable violent men to change their behaviour. The research was supported by Respect, the UK’s umbrella organisation for domestic violence perpetrator programmes.

Charlotte Helen Watts, CMG, FMedSci (born 1962) is a British mathematician, epidemiologist, and academic. She is the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department for International Development. Her research interests include HIV and gender-based violence. She was a Professor of Mathematical Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Born in Farnborough, Kent, England in 1962, she was educated at Falmouth School, a state school in Cornwall. She studied mathematics and pure mathematics at university. She graduated from Exeter College, Oxford with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1984, from Marlboro College (in Vermont, US) with a Master of Science (MSc) degree in 1986, and from the University of Warwick with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1990. Her doctoral thesis concerned the “stochastic stability of diffeomorphisms”.