Dr Kevin Watt is a Team Leader in the Heart Regeneration Laboratory at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Associate Investigator at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW). Dr Watt holds an honorary appointment as a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anatomy and Physiology, University of Melbourne. Dr Watt's research seeks to develop new therapies to treat heart failure that can prevent or delay the need for heart transplantation. Our group are internationally recognised for the use of patient derived human-induced pluripotent stem cell models of the heart. Using these translational models, in combination with high-throughput drug screening and advanced transcriptomics and phosphoproteomics methodologies, we conduct target indentification and drug discovery to identify novel hit compounds for further drug development.

As a Physiologist and Biomedical scientist by training, I have a passion for understanding the molecular mechanisms that govern the development, maturation, and regeneration of striated muscle cells. I seek to build on 15 years of experience using cell and animal models of skeletal and cardiac muscle to develop new therapeutic interventions to treat inherited muscle diseases in humans. I manage a multi-disciplinary team of 7 research staff and 2 PhD students with skillsets in pluripotent stem cell and cardiac organoid culture, small animal research, molecular biology, high-throughput screening, and bioinformatics.

I have a PhD from the University of Aberdeen, UK (2010) and completed post-doctoral research positions at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (2010), Baker Institute (2011-2018), and Centre of Muscle Research at The University of Melbourne (2018-2022). In 2022, I moved to the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute to take a leadership role in the Heart Regeneration and Heart Disease Laboratories in the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre of Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW Melbourne).