Mary P. Watson was born in Massachusetts in 1977 and grew up in Tampa, FL. She completed an A.B. in Chemistry at Harvard University in 2000. During college, she performed undergraduate research with Professor David A. Evans at Harvard University, as well as with Professor Kenneth B. Wagener at the University of Florida.
Under the direction of Professor Larry E. Overman, she earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 2006 from the University of California, Irvine. Her doctoral thesis focused on the development and mechanistic investigation of the palladium(II)-catalyzed asymmetric allylic imidate rearrangement. During the course of this work, she had the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Robert G. Bergman at the University of California, Berkeley, where she performed kinetic and computational studies.
From 2006–2009, she was an National Institutes of Health NRSA postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in Professor Eric N. Jacobsen's research group. During her postdoc, she developed a nickel-catalyzed method for olefin arylcyanation via activation of C–CN bonds.
She joined the faculty at the University of Delaware in July 2009.