Watts Lab

Dr. Katharine Watts was born and raised in the most Western city in Texas, El Paso, sandwiched between New Mexico and the Mexican border. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry at University of Texas El Paso and performed undergraduate research in organometallic synthesis. Dr. Watts then left the southwestern desert and moved to the California coastline to obtain a PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry from University of California, Santa Cruz. Under the direction of Professor Phillips Crews, her PhD work focused on isolation, structure elucidation, and biological evaluation of natural product molecules from marine sponges and marine-derived fungi. Becoming more interested in biochemistry at this time, Dr. Watts went on to a cooperative teaching and research postdoctoral fellowship (NIH-IRACDA) between San Jose State University and Stanford University. Dr. Watts obtained mentored teaching experience in organic chemistry and biochemistry at SJSU with Professors Okuda and D’Alarcao. In Professor Chaitan Khosla’s lab at Stanford, Dr. Watts examined biosynthetic pathways in soil-derived bacteria, including projects in metabolic engineering and enzymology. At Cal Poly, research in the Watts lab focuses on connecting genes and enzymes to natural products in Actinobacteria. Dr. Watts teaches classes in biochemistry, molecular biology, and general chemistry.