Charlotte Watts

Professor Charlotte Watts is the Chief Scientific Adviser and Director for Research and Evidence in the Foreign, Commonwealth & 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.

Charlotte has over 200 peer review academic publications, commentaries and book chapters. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Foreign Associate Member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

Charlotte is committed to using science and evidence to achieve impact, and in 2019 was included in Apolitical ‘The World’s 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy’. She also has a Chelsea Flower Show gold-medal for ‘the CAMFED garden’, that conveyed the transformative power of education for girls in Africa.

Charlotte is a global expert in violence prevention. She was Senior Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) 10 country population surveys on women’s health and domestic violence. Charlotte founded the Gender, Violence and Health Centre at LSHTM. She has been senior researcher/principle investigator on 5 randomised controlled trials, to assess the impact of different forms of violence prevention, with the findings showing that domestic violence is preventable. Charlotte has Chaired the Technical Working Group to assess the global burden of intimate violence, and was lead editor of the 2014 Lancet Series on Violence Against Women and Health.