Jenna Watson, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Translational Anatomy in the Department of Radiology at UMass Chan. Dr. Watson joined the UMass Chan faculty in 2024 after completing an MA and PhD in biological anthropology with a graduate minor in epidemiology from the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Dr. Watson is a member of the core anatomy faculty in the T.H. Chan School of Medicine where she teaches human anatomy lectures and dissection labs in the pre-clinical curriculum for first- and second-year medical students. Dr. Watson also earned a BA degree in anthropology from Wellesley College and then served with AmeriCorps NCCC (National Civilian Community Corps) - FEMA Corps providing logistical and administrative support to FEMA’s disaster mitigation, response, and recovery projects at FEMA regional offices in Missouri and Texas, and at FEMA headquarters in Washington DC. She then spent two years in New York City working as an executive assistant at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a non-profit organization whose mission is to use medicine and science to document human rights atrocities.

While at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Watson worked with the Forensic Anthropology Center (FAC) and their Body Donation Program, and assisted with forensic casework, training courses, and grant funded research projects at the FAC’s Anthropology Research Facility (ARF) on human decomposition/time since death estimation and rapid DNA analysis for disaster victim identification (DVI). In addition to anatomy education, Dr. Watson’s research is focused on health, mortality, and human-environment interactions in medieval Europe. Her work uses skeletal morphology, skeletal pathology, and stable isotope analysis of bones and teeth to explore physiological stress, disease, diet, and geographic mobility in late medieval populations from northeast Romania. This work was funded by a Fulbright research grant from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and the Romanian Fulbright Commission. Dr. Watson’s work aims to reconstruct morbidity and mortality in the past and provide a historical and anthropological perspective on the biological, environmental, and cultural factors that impact health. Ultimately, this research can be used to improve our understanding of how these same factors drive differential health outcomes today and leverage medical and anthropological research to improve human health.

Dr. Watson is passionate about guiding learners through the human anatomy experience, particularly in the dissection lab due to the many skills it teaches learners that are key to their future clinical practice and the exposure to human variation that is crucial to learners’ training and understanding of their future patients. She also believes it is important for learners to understand how the anatomical and biological interact with social and structural determinants of health that create health inequities and affect health outcomes of patients. This understanding will prepare learners to be compassionate providers that are informed of the structural barriers to care that many people face.