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Hugh Watkins is the Radcliffe Professor of Medicine and Head of the Radcliffe Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford and Honorary Consultant in Cardiology at the John Radcliffe Hospital. From 1998-2005 he was Programme Director of the Wellcome Trust Cardiovascular Research Initiative at the University of Oxford. He has been the Director of the British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence at Oxford since its inception in 2008. Professor Watkins was a member of the Fondation Leducq Scientific Advisory Committee from 2011 to 2017. Honors and distinctions have included the Thomas Lewis Lecture, British Cardiac Society, 2004, the Paul Dudley White Lecture, American Heart Association, 2011 and the Mackenzie Medal of the British Cardiovascular Society in 2018.

Professor Watkins has made a series of major contributions to the understanding of the molecular genetic basis of cardiovascular disease, using genetic approaches to define disease mechanisms and to improve diagnosis and treatment of patients and families with inherited diseases. He works on both rare inherited diseases, such as cardiomyopathy, where genetic advances now underpin diagnosis and new approaches to therapy, and common diseases such as Coronary Artery Disease where the goal is to use newly identified common genetic variants to define novel therapeutic targets. Through both his Mendelian and complex trait genetics work, Professor Watkins has defined some of the most medically important disease genes affecting the cardiovascular system. He has built up a specialist clinical and laboratory genetic service in Inherited Cardiac Conditions in Oxford which has a national and international profile and he has authored clinical and genetic testing guidelines for US and European societies. He has an h-index of over 100 and is a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher.

In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.