Chief Scientific AdviserForeign, Commonwealth and Development Office
Professor Charlotte Watts CMG is the Chief Scientific Adviser and Director for Research and Evidence in the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). She is seconded from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), where she is Professor of Social and Mathematical Epidemiology.
Originally trained as a mathematician, with a PhD in Theoretical Mathematics from the University of Warwick, she became interested in global health whilst conducting post-doctoral research on the epidemiology of HIV at the University of Oxford. Moving to LSHTM in 1994, she founded the Social and Mathematical Epidemiology Group, this multidisciplinary group uses mathematical, epidemiological and economic research to assess the impact of current and new HIV prevention technologies and evaluate interventions that tackle the determinants of HIV risk. Charlotte is a global expert in violence prevention and was Senior Technical Advisor to the WHO 10 country population surveys on women’s health and domestic violence; she is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Foreign Associate Member of the US National Academy of Medicine. She has 200 academic publications and she was included in Apolitical ‘The World’s 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy’.