Dr. Jerrell Watts (MS'96 CS, PhD'98 CS)

Jerrell Watts is currently the Head of Algorithmic Trading at Point72, where he is responsible for a number of quantitative trading efforts across the firm's discretionary and systematic investing businesses. He was previously the Head of Algorithmic Execution and Order Routing at Citadel LLC. At Citadel, he served in quantitative research roles on both the asset management and broker-dealer (Citadel Securities) sides of the business. Prior to Citadel, he was a high frequency portfolio manager at Merrill Lynch. Before Merrill Lynch, he was the founder and head of the automated market making effort in equity options at Lehman Brothers, having previously worked on a similar project at Morgan Stanley. He began his career in finance as a quantitative developer at D. E. Shaw & Co. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology. He was born and grew up in Odessa, Texas.