Kevin M. Watt, MD, PhD

Dr. Kevin Watt received his medical degree and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his pediatric residency, pediatric critical care fellowship, and a research fellowship at Duke University. He was a faculty member at Duke for 7 years before accepting a position in 2019 at the University of Utah. He is currently the Robert M. Ward Endowed Chair in Clinical Pharmacology and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics. He serves as the Chief of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology in the Department of Pediatrics and treats patients in the pediatric intensive care unit at Primary Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Watt’s research career spans over twenty-four years at institutions such as the Thomas J Watson Foundation, The JW Jones Ecological Research Center and the Duke Clinical Research Institute at Duke University. This research coincided with his work in the US Food and Drug Administration where his focus was appropriate dosage and labeling for prescription drugs for children.

Dr. Watt’s overarching career goals are to advance public health by optimizing drug therapy in critically ill children and to train the future generation of health care scientists. To accomplish these goals, I lead a multidisciplinary team of cross-trained scientists and staff who have expertise in critical illness physiology, advanced pharmacokinetic (PK)/ pharmacodynamic (PD) modeling, biostatistics, and clinical trial design and conduct. His NIH-funded research program uses modeling and simulation to determine optimal drug dosing in vulnerable populations (e.g., critically ill children, breastfeeding women and their infants). In addition, he has led and continues to lead, single and multi-center trials for pediatric labeling including several first-in-human and first-in-children trials. He serves in a leadership role in the NICHD-funded Collaborative Pediatric Critical Research Network and the NCATS-funded Utah Trial Innovation Center and HEAL-initiative.