Prof Frances Gardner is the Senior Research Investigator for the GPI. She is also a Co-Principal Investigator for Parenting within the Preschool System in Malaysia and a Co-Investigator for Parenting on the Thailand/Myanmar Border and Parenting within the Public Health System in Thailand. She is a Professor of Child and Family Psychology at the University of Oxford and Co-Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Intervention at the University of Oxford. Her 30-year career in parenting research involves developing, testing, and scaling up parenting interventions in many countries, including Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) in low- and middle-income countries, with projects in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Her parenting evaluations and systematic reviews are highly cited (over 17,000 times), including seminal studies of the transportability of parenting interventions across cultures and countries, their essential components, and analyses to understand for whom these interventions are most effective.
She works closely with policymakers, and led the team conducting the systematic reviews for the new WHO Guideline on Parenting Interventions. Her work has influenced government and NGO parenting policy in many countries and regions, working with UNICEF, UNODC, WHO, EU, UK National Parenting Academy, and government ministries of many countries. In 2019 she also received the Nan Tobler Award for Review of the Prevention Science Literature from the Society for Prevention.