Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Environmental Health Science, New York University, 2008
  • B.A., Mathematics and Biology, Claremont McKenna College, 2002
Professional Affiliations
  • American Statistical Association
  • Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Dr. Watson specializes in biostatistics and has extensive experience in the statistical analysis of hospital discharge databases, medical claims databases, and accident databases. She also has experience in predictive analytics, reliability analysis, sampling methods, experimental design, data mining, and risk analysis.

Dr. Watson has collaborated with biomechanical engineers to create efficient designs for computer simulation experiments and to investigate injury patterns of pedestrians in motor vehicle accidents using the National Automotive Sampling System. She has worked with scientists in health on epidemiologic studies examining the incidence and treatment of glaucoma patients, performing meta-analyses of studies concerning uterine cancer, and looking at treatment patterns of hip or knee replacements. In addition, she has teamed with engineers to inspect failure trends of issued identification cards, to calculate failure rates and projected failures from warranty claims data, and to estimate injury risk from different consumer products. She has experience using large data bases, such as Medicare claim records, warranty claims databases, NASS CDS, NASS GES, FARS, NFIRS, NEISS and NIS.

Before joining Exponent, Dr. Watson attended New York University and served as a graduate assistant in the Division of Biostatistics at New York University, School of Medicine. Her background is in biology and mathematics. Her thesis research includes the application of statistical methods to local clustering of disease, focused clustering of disease near a putative hazard, and disease mapping utilizing Bayesian hierarchical modeling.