Nigel Watson obtained his Ph.D. from the University 麻豆精选 in 1991, on event reconstruction and measurements of electroweak effects in e+e- the . Continuing on this experiment, his physics activities included WW physics, soft QCD and event generators, and his technical contributions included online monitoring and alignment/calibration of the Z tracking chambers; online/offline database system for the experiment; reconstruction software for the endcap muon chambers; and software distribution framework.
In 2001, he began development of high precision calorimetry for a future e+e- collider (, ~300 physicists), was joint analysis coordinator (2007-2012) and has carried out simulation studies, data analysis and testbeams for a CMOS MAPS based digital ECAL (DECAL). In 2013, he joined the . He continues the DECAL development in the context of the EPICAL-2 R&D project (links to ALICE FoCAL).
He coordinated R&D for the ILC Beam Delivery System collimators, was PI for the SLAC T480 R&D project (), and for tests at KEK.
Following on from his career interests in precise measurements, carried out at LEP and prepared for by ILC-R&D, in 2011 Nigel brought a team at Birmingham into the , to extract new physics with rare decays at LHC, as well as working on the core simulation framework. More recently, he has joined the , searching for long-lived particles using the LHCb interaction point.