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Dr Luke
Ward

Lecturer in Child & Adolescent Mental Health - Faculty of Health, Education and Society

Lecturer in Child & Adolescent Mental Health

Faculty of Health, Education and Society

  • Luke completed his BA(Hons) degree in Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Northampton. He then continued to study for his MSc in Counselling Children and Young People, also at Northampton, where he began his clinical practice, volunteering at The Lowdown (a local charity providing free counselling to young people). He has specialised in working with developmental trauma and currently works in private practice. He has also volunteered as a youth leader for an LGBTQ+ youth group and has provided training for charities, schools, and therapy services on supporting LGBTQ+ young people. Luke is an accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). He completed his PhD at the University of Stirling exploring gender regulation for non-binary youth.

    Luke’s pronouns are he/they.

  • Luke is a tutor for the MSc in Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) and predominantly teaches at postgraduate level. He is the module coordinator for a therapeutic skills module in the MSc CAMH programme, helping students put theory into practice. He has also taught both undergraduate and postgraduate research methods. Luke won the university’s award for ‘Advancing Equality and Diversity’ in 2020.

  • Luke’s main research centres around gender, sexuality, and mental health. This follows from his MSc and PhD research, which focused on non-binary youth and their gender identities. He has worked on and led several research projects, focusing on ‘safe spaces’ in learning and teaching in higher education, and trans and non-binary people’s experiences of their sexualities. Luke has published multiple articles from the projects and in 2024 won the Early Career Researcher award at the university.

    Luke is a qualitative researcher, with experience in feminist relational discourse analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and thematic analysis. He is passionate about participatory and creative forms of research that focus on identities – particularly genders and sexualities.

  • For publications, projects, datasets, research interests and activities, view Luke Ward’s research profile on Pure, the University of Northampton’s Research Explorer.