John Watts

Dr. Watts is an Associate Professor at the RNA Therapeutics Institute, part of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His academic research is focused on advancing new medicinal chemistry approaches for several classes of oligonucleotides and developing novel tools for sequencing and synthetic biology. Prior to his role at UMass Medical, Dr. Watts was an Associate Professor in Chemical Biology at the University of Southampton, UK, where he received the 2013 Young Investigator Award from the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society. He brings over 15 years of oligonucleotide research experience to PepGen’s SAB, and developed two new oligonucleotide analogues as part of his Ph.D. studies at McGill University in Canada.