Kim Watson
Professor in Structural Biochemistry at the School of Biological Sciences
Kim Watson is Professor in Structural Biochemistry at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, UK. Kim completed her BSc (Hons) degree in Canada at Queen’s University, Department of Chemistry, where she specialised in analytical chemistry. She then completed an MSc at Queen’s in Crystallography, with a keen interest in the structure of novel carbohydrates. Kim received her DPhil from Oxford University, as a Commonwealth Scholar, where she studied Molecular Biophysics.
She holds an honorary research group leader role at the Harwell Research Complex, Diamond Light Source. Kim is a Chartered Biologist, Fellow the Royal Society of Biology, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Kim has significant expertise in translational research and experience leading multi-disciplinary, multi-site research with Biopharma and Biotech Industries. Her research utilises structure-based and computer-aided approaches to understand how proteins function and how that function translates to health. Kim’s research focuses on unravelling the mechanisms by which prebiotics and novel compounds provide a beneficial effect on gut health and how a healthy gut microbiome can alter gut-liver and gut-brain crosstalk, leading to improvements in biomarkers of healthy ageing.
Kim’s research is supported by strong Industrial collaborations ensuring the research is real world focused and expedites any positive outcomes, bringing new entities to a commercial market and delivering new compounds, with detailed understanding of their mechanism of action, to treat and even prevent age-related disease progression.
Kim has successfully published more than 70 papers and 5 book chapters, including a total of 27 protein structures published in the Protein Data Bank.