Chief and Associate Professor
University of Utah
Kevin Watt, MD, PhD, is an associate professor in the Division of Critical Care and serves as the division chief of Clinical Pharmacology in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He also attends in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Primary Children’s Medical Center, where he takes care of critically ill children and helps to train residents and fellows. He 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 before accepting a position at the University of Utah.
Dr. Watt devotes his non-clinical time conducting research on the effects and long-term safety of medications in children. Dr. Watt’s research activities focus on integrating physiology and pharmacology into approaches for designing, conducting, and interpreting clinical trials in children. He leads an NIH-funded research program to determine dosing of drugs in children supported with extracorporeal life support (e.g., ECMO, dialysis). In addition, he leads trials to determine 1) the effect of obesity on drug disposition; 2) the long-term safety of antipsychotics in children; and 3) the extent of drug passage into breastmilk and the resulting infant dose. He has close relations with the FDA and served for 3 years as a Scientific Advisor to the FDA’s Office of Pediatric Therapeutics. In addition, Dr. Watt works closely with other groups of researchers across the US and internationally including the NICHD-sponsored Pediatric Trials Network; the Antibiotic Resistance Leadership Group; Pediatrix data warehouse group (320 intensive care nurseries); and investigators in the European Union.