Dr. Anna Watts

Biography

Anna Watts is a Full Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where she is part of the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy. She completed her PhD in the General Relativity group at the University of Southampton in 2004. Following her doctoral studies, she held postdoctoral fellowships at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. Since moving to Amsterdam in 2008, she has engaged in significant research and teaching efforts. Anna studies violent dynamical events in neutron stars, focusing on thermonuclear explosions, starquakes, and magnetic flares. Her research aims to understand the physics that drives these processes, particularly through the study of ultra-strong magnetic fields and the nature of supranuclear density matter in the cores of neutron stars. Her work straddles the boundary between theoretical physics and astrophysics, and she is actively involved in the development of future high-energy space telescopes, co-chairing the Dense Matter Science Working Group for the proposed Enhanced X-ray Timing Polarization (eXTP) telescope. She is also the Programme Director for the Joint Bachelor’s Degree in Physics & Astronomy and serves as the Scientific Editor for Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Research Interests

Experience