Allan Watson is a Reader of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews. He graduated from University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, where he continued for his PhD studies on organometallic methodology development.

He then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University working with Professor David W. C. MacMillan on natural product total synthesis. In 2010 he returned to the UK to an industrial postdoctoral position at GlaxoSmithKline and in 2011 he was appointed to a Lectureship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde. He moved to St Andrews in January 2018.

His research interests are based around the development of new catalytic processes and their application in synthesis, which has recently included the development of catalytic reactions for C–X bond formation.