Speaker
Professor Rachel Calam
PhD MClinPsychol is Professor Emerita, Division of Psychology and Mental Health, School of Health Sciences, The University of Manchester, UK
Biography
Rachel Calam PhD MClinPsychol is Professor Emerita, Division of Psychology and Mental Health, School of Health Sciences, The University of Manchester, UK. She was programme director for the doctorate in clinical psychology at Manchester before becoming Head of the School of Psychological Sciences there. Her research focus has been on prevention approaches to protecting the mental health of children and families. She has a particular interest in developing and evaluating parenting and family skills resources for low and middle income countries and very low resource contexts. She acts as a consultant and technical expert with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime prevention group on parenting and family skills in different contexts. In this context, she has worked with a group who have developed new programmes which are now in use in many countries worldwide. She has worked most recently on parenting and intervention needs of children, young people and families who are in war, displacement and resettlement contexts, using novel, low cost ways of sharing information, for example distributing brief written material via bread supplies into conflict zones. She has worked with other groups internationally on different ways of combining caregiver and family skills with trauma recovery approaches for children and young people across these settings.