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Sabbatical update: Currently I am on leave for a year at the Univeristy of Bonn, in Germany. I received a DAAD fellowship to teach and do research in the Argelander Institute for Astronomy. I'll be teaching space plasmas, and working on ionospheric research for LWA and LOFAR.

Welcome. I'm Christopher Watts, research professor at the University of New Mexico. My research interests encompass a hodgepodge of topics tenuously united under rubrics like nonlinear phenomena, plasmas, fluctuations, optics/spectroscopy and space plasmas. Specifically, my current foci are helicon plasma sources, Alfvén waves in the solar atmosphere and magnetospheric plasmas, and electron cyclotron measurements and temperature fluctuations in fusion plasmas. Check the research topics for more details. I also teach courses in Electrodynamics, Plasma Physics and Space Plasmas.

A brief bio: I got my undergraduate degree from Occidental College. Immediately after, I spent two years in the Peace Corps teaching in a rural Kenyan school, and then moved to Germany and spent three years doing research in nonlinear optics at the DLR. My doctorate research was done on the Madison Symmetric Torus (a fusion experiment) looking for, and not finding, global chaotic behavior. I also did spectroscopic ion temperature measurements. I had a post graduate fellowshop at the University of Warwick in England invstigating chaos. I spent 2 1/ 2 years at the TEXT tokamak (another fusion experiment) measuring core electron temperature fluctuations. I then spent 6 months at the W7-AS stellarator in Germany (more temperature fluctuations). I was a professor in the Auburn University Physics Department for five years, and had a very productive teaching and research career with an excellent group of colleagues. However, the political and social climate of the South (negative), as well as the environmental and social climate of the Southwest (positive), led me away from Alabama to New Mexico. I was faculty at New Mexico Tech for three years before leaving for the flagship University of UNM.

In 2010 I was awarded a DAAD fellowship for a year's Guest Professorship at the Univerisity of Bonn, where I teach plasma astrophysics.