Ken Watts

Academic Life 

Ken Watts studied Mathematics at Van Mildert College from 1969-72. He played in, and eventually captained, the newly formed University volleyball team, and was awarded colours for university volleyball. He lived out of college at the top of Claypath for most of his three years.

After leaving Durham, he studied for a Masters in Computer Science at Birmingham University from 1972-3. 

Professional life

After Birmingham, Ken moved to South Cheshire to work for ICL writing compilers. As part of the team on the ICL CAFS Search Engine, he was responsible for the software code generator, and was presented with the Queen's Award for Technical Achievement in 1985. In 1989 as part of his work on CAFS and Relational Databases, Ken was assigned to Ingres, Alameda, California to work on a joint project for 15 months. He left ICL 4 years later to join Ingres, then moved to Sybase followed by Documentum  (now part of EMC). He recently moved on from EMC and is now responsible for Process and Metrics in the Enterprise Protection team at Symantec in Mountain View, California. 

Social and Family life

Ken is married to Jean (nee Wright, Cert Ed., St. Hild's 1968-71) with one daughter, Fiona (BA Psychology, Castle 2001-2, for UCLA junior year). They still have strong emotional and physical ties to Durham and the North East. 

In 2000 they decided that they might be staying in the US for a while, so became dual citizens. Ken and Jean love the Bay Area - in the past they were avid skiers, but spend more time now cycling, walking, playing golf and undertaking all sorts of travel near and far. Born to cruise.

Ken's passion is music, particularly rock music, but he appreciates pretty much anything anyone puts out there for others to listen to. He plays electric, acoustic and bass guitars, plus mandolin. The pinnacle of his playing career was playing a gig at the Rio Hotel, Las Vegas, albeit a corporately sponsored event.

Email: kenwatts@dunelm.org.uk