Anna Watts, Ph.D.

Watts is a professor of high-energy astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam. She and her research group study neutron stars: the dense nuclear matter in their cores, the violent dynamical events that rock their surfaces and their ultra-strong magnetic fields. Born in the U.K., she earned a bachelor’s in physics at the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Southampton. She moved to the Netherlands in 2008 after postdoctoral fellowships at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. While the move was ostensibly “for a couple of years,” she joined the faculty there and never left.