[2] Watson did his Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow, and worked in the UK, United States and Canada.

He was a postdoctoral fellow under Jon Hougen in the Molecular Spectroscopy Group of Gerhard Herzberg at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario from 1963 to 1965.

Watson published a number of papers in which he developed and applied molecular Hamiltonians to problems in spectroscopy.

[4] He received the 1986 Earle K. Plyer Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics from the American Physical Society.

The citation reads: "For his numerous fundamental contributions to the theory of rovibronic interactions in molecules, especially the development of the universally used Watson Hamiltonian for vibration-rotation energy levels, the unified treatment of centrifugal distortion in molecules, the elucidation of forbidden rotational transitions in spherical tops, the application of advanced symmetry arguments to perturbations in external fields, and investigations of the Jahn-Teller effect in