Professor Catherine Ward is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Clinical-Community Psychology from the University of South Carolina, USA. Her research interests are in violence prevention from the perspective of children’s development, and particularly in public health approaches to this – in developing evidence-based approaches to violence prevention that have a wide reach and are effective in improving children’s development and reducing their likelihood of becoming aggressive. Much of her current work is focused on preventing child maltreatment, and on understanding the epidemiology of risk factors faced by South African children. In line with this, she is one of the developers of the Parenting for Lifelong Health suite of programmes that aim to support parents to raise non-violent children in non-violent homes (see https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/child/plh/en/ for details).
