Dr Thomas Watts is Team Leader of the Medical Microbiology division of the OneHealth Microbiology Research Lab within the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University. Tom's current research focuses on three core pillars: bacterial pathogenesis and host-pathogen interactions, environmental persistence of pathogens, and the molecular biology of mobile genetic elements.

Tom was awarded a PhD from Monash University (2019), which resolved the conjugative potential, persistence mechanisms and incompatiblity determinants of a novel family of toxin plasmids in the clostridia. Tom then completed a 2-year stint as a postdoctoral researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he focused on population heterogeneity of important surface structures in the pathogen Enterococcus faecalis with Professor Kimberly Kline.  

In 2022, Tom joined Professor Chris Greening's lab at Monash University. Tom maintains his broad interest in infection biology, bacterial pathogenesis and molecular biology, but has since been exposed to the world of microbial ecology and environmental microbiology. Tom currently leads projects that aim to resolve the interactions that occur between host and pathogen at several clinically relevent frontiers. In particular, Tom is interested in using ex vivo tissue models to study the metabolic and immune evasive strategies employed by priority pathogens, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Staphylococcus aureus, during the early stages of lung infection. In addition, Tom leads an array of projects that deal with gut microbiome metabolism, and the persistence of clinically relevant microorganisms in urban water environments.