Cameron joined King’s as an Academic Clinical Fellow in 2022, combining neuropsychiatric research with his clinical work in the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. He trained in Medicine (MBBCh, Hons) and Psychology (BSc Hons) at Cardiff University, where at the Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics he developed an interest in the role of rare genetic variants in neuropsychiatric disorders.

After graduating, he gained a place on the London Academic Foundation Programme and worked as a medical doctor in a range of settings before undertaking research and clinical fellowships in neurology at QMUL and the Royal London Hospital.

Cameron has a wide range of clinical interests across neuropsychiatry, from rare copy-number variants to neurodegenerative disorders. During his current academic fellowship, he aims to leverage genomic data to dissect the relationship between psychosis and cognitive impairment to better delineate neuropsychiatric phenotypes within schizophrenia.

Qualifications

BSc, MBBCh

Research Interests

• Neuropsychiatric genetics
• Cognitive neuropsychiatry
• Psychosis
• Copy-number variants
• Neurodevelopment
• Pharmacogenetics 

Research Groups

Neuropsychiatry Research and Education Group (NREG)

Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry centre 

Teaching

Cameron has been invited to develop modules in genetics and genomics by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Healthcare Leadership Academy.

He provides regular clinical teaching to medical students at King’s and currently supervises students on the Clinical Neuropsychiatry MSc.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Along with other members of the NREG, Cameron helped curate the JNNP neuropsychiatry of COVID-19 blog and develop the Neuropsych.net website, a repository for all things neuropsychiatry, including a regular journal club.

Away from medicine, Cameron co-chairs the Ted Senior Foundation, a suicide prevention charity aiming to improve the wellbeing of students and young people around the country. 

Key Publications

Watson, C. J., et al. (2021). "COVID-19 and psychosis risk: Real or delusional concern?." Neuroscience letters.

Chawner, S. J., Watson, C. J., & Owen, M. J. (2021). Clinical evaluation of patients with a neuropsychiatric risk copy number variant. Current opinion in genetics & development, 68, 26-34.

Linden, S. C., Watson, C. J., Smith, J., Chawner, S. J., Lancaster, T. M., Evans, F., ... & van den Bree, M. B. (2021). The psychiatric phenotypes of 1q21 distal deletion and duplication. Translational psychiatry, 11(1), 105.

Rogers, J. P., Watson, C. J., Badenoch, J., Cross, B., Butler, M., Song, J., ... & Rooney, A. G. (2021). Neurology and neuropsychiatry of COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the early literature reveals frequent CNS manifestations and key emerging narratives. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 92(9), 932-941.

Jacobs, B. M., Watson, C. J., Marshall, C., Noyce, A., & Dobson, R. (2022). No evidence for association between polygenic risk of Multiple Sclerosis and MRI phenotypes in~ 30,000 healthy adult UK Biobank participants. Multiple Sclerosis Journal, 28(10), 1656-1657.

Badenoch, J. B., Rengasamy, E. R., Watson, C. J,... & Rooney, A. G. (2022). Persistent neuropsychiatric symptoms after COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Brain communications.

Foote, I. F., Jacobs, B. M., Mathlin, G., Watson, C. J., Bothongo, P. L., Waters, S., ... & Marshall, C. R. (2022). The shared genetic architecture of modifiable risk for Alzheimer's disease: a genomic structural equation modelling study. Neurobiology of Aging, 117, 222-235.