Annie Watson earned her PhD in political science and international affairs from the University of Georgia in 2020. She joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 2024 as a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, where she is teaching classes on data science and international relations.

Dr. Watson is deeply passionate about the good that good data can do. Thus, her research focuses on holding governments accountable for their obligations under international law, particularly through the construction of new measures of how the degree to which governments respect human rights. In this capacity, she currently serves as the co-lead of the children’s rights workstream at the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), a research analyst for HRMI’s economic and social rights workstream and the Social and Economic Rights Fulfillment (SERF) Index, and a principal investigator for the CEDAW Compliance Codes (C3).