Personal homepage

https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/a.l.watts/

Profile

Anna Watts is a Full Professor at the University of Amsterdam.  After completing her PhD in the General Relativity group at the University of Southampton in 2004, she held postdoctoral fellowships at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (Germany) before moving to Amsterdam in 2008.  She is an NWO Vidi and ERC Starter Grant Laureate, and is Secretary of the Steering Committee for International Astronomical Union Division D (High Energy Phenomena and Fundamental Physics). 

Research and teaching

Anna studies violent dynamical events on neutron stars:  thermonuclear explosions, starquakes, and magnetic flares.  Her goal is to understand the physics that drives these processes, and to use them to study ultra-strong magnetic fields and the nature of the supranuclear density matter that exists in the cores of neutron stars.  Her research programme sits at the boundary of theoretical physics and astrophysics.  She is very actively involved in the development of future high-energy space telescopes, and co-Chairs the Dense Matter Science Working Group for the proposed Enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarization (eXTP) telescope. 

She is also Programme Director for the Joint Bachelors Degree in Physics & Astronomy.

Keywords

Neutron stars, dense matter, thermonuclear bursts, magnetar bursts.