Dr. Paula Watnick is a senior associate physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Boston Children’s Hospital and an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She practices pediatric infectious diseases and studies intestinal pathogens and their interactions with the host intestine.

Watnick completed graduate work in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and subsequently attended Yale Medical School, did a residency in internal medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and completed a clinical fellowship in infectious diseases at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a postdoctoral fellowship in bacterial genetics at Harvard Medical School.   

Watnick’s research interests currently include biofilm-based vaccines, metabolic control of bacterial transcription and the impact of commensal metabolites and pathogen quorum sensing on host innate immunity and metabolic homeostasis in model hosts. She is on the editorial board of Infection and Immunity, a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Microbiology.