After completing his early education at Cheadle Hulme School, he enrolled at the University of Wales and graduated with majors in Physics and Chemistry in 1967.

[5] Following his doctoral degree, Watts started his academic career at Sandbach School, Cheshire, where he taught chemistry, Physics and Religious Education until 1972.

[5] Watts has served as a UK Principal Expert to International Standards Organization Technical Committee 106 (Dentistry), on ceramics, composite materials, adhesion and photo-polymerization from 1986 to 2011.

[8] Watts's work on the discovery of the Williams-Watts [or KWW] "stretched exponential" relaxation function for condensed media, was first used in 19th century to describe charge decay in the Leyden jar and creep in fibres.

This work has been identified by Graham Williams and Watts in the dielectric behavior of solid polymers and mathematically re-expressed by Fourier transformation in forms appropriate to the analysis of both time and frequency domain measurements.

[9] In the 1970s, Williams and Watts published non-symmetrical dielectric relaxation behaviour resulting from a simple empirical decay function.

[12] He also characterised the Young's moduli (E) of a series of model dental resin-composites using nanoindentation, and examined how E was influenced by differences in filler-size and shape.