Andrea Watson Merck & Co., Inc.

Andrea R. Watson is a Senior Scientist at Merck & Co., Inc. in the Molecular & Virus Safety team where she designs, develops, and adapts computational NGS-based pipelines to detect and identify adventitious viral agents and support the biomanufacturing process. Previously, she acted as a lead bioinformatician at Vedanta Biosciences, supporting the development of live biotherapeutic products for the treatment of infectious and immune mediated diseases. She has a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Chicago, supervised by Professor A. Murat Eren. Her thesis examined determinants of microbial colonization in the human gastrointestinal system using genome-resolved metagenomics. Andrea’s eight plus years of experience in microbiology, bioinformatics, and computational biology has given her a broad microbial ‘omics and computational skillset.