Durban Office

Prof Linda Richter | Distinguished Professor

Prof Richter is a Distinguished Professor in the Centre, and a developmental psychologist with a PhD from the University of Natal. She is the author or co-author of more than 400 papers, books, book chapters and reports on basic and policy research in child and family development. She led the development of South Africa’s National Integrated Early Child Development Policy and Programme, adopted by Cabinet in 2015 as well as the 2017 Lancet Series Advancing Early Child Development: From Science to Scale. Linda is also the Principal Investigator of several large-scale, longterm collaborative projects, including Birth to Thirty (BT30), the birth cohort study of 3273 South African children followed up for 30 years. She has just published a book on the study describing the science emanating from the research intertwined with the stories of those involved. She also received the NRF Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021, recognizing her extraordinary contributions to science in and for South Africa and globally. Linda is also a member of the Wellcome Trust Discovery Award Interview Panel.

Tamsen Rochat | Associate Professor

Prof Rochat is a clinical psychologist who has extensively researched parenting and mental health interventions, including providing seminal research leadership to the Amagugu Intervention in KwaZulu-Natal. She is a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellow in Public Health and Tropical Medicine, an honorary research associate in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, and leads the adolescence research programme at the DPHRU. She also leads the Siyakhula Cohort and in 2020, established a new cohort in Soweto (the BEACON Cohort) investigating the link between executive function, mental health, and risk behaviour in early adolescence. She holds a C-Rating from the NRF.

Ms Sara Naicker | Research Project Manager

Ms Naicker is a Research Project Manager in the Centre. She has managed a number of large and small projects based in South Africa and abroad, on early childhood development, child and adolescent health and well-being, and families and children in vulnerable contexts. Sara’s current work on adversity assesses the extent to which exposure to multiple and cumulative adversities in childhood is associate with poor health and wellbeing in adulthood.