Rachel Calam

Overview

Professor Calam is Professor of Child and Family Psychology.

Biography

Following a PhD developmental psychology, Rachel Calam moved into research on child maltreatment then trained as a clinical psychologist.  She worked at the Royal Manchester Children''s Hospital at Pendlebury before taking up a post as Lecturer in Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool.  She came to The University of Manchester in 1992, and was Programme Director for the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from 1994 to 2011. She then became Professor of Child and Family Psychology, leading the Parenting and Families Research Group, and was Head of the School of Psychological Sciences fron 2011 to 2016.

Current projects focus on parenting in families with significant mental health difficulties, with an MRC funded project on parenting and bipolar disorder with colleagues at Lancaster University completed recently, and NIHR studies of parenting infants under way. A series of studies examines parenting in different cultures and countries, including Panama and Syria. 

A significant area of activity is her work on developing computer-assisted interviewing as a means of helping to give a voice to children. An interview "In My Shoes" that she and colleagues developed in a collaboration between the Unversities of Liverpool and Manchester is now disseminated internationally. The approach is being tested in a collaborative grant with colleagues at Uppsala University funded by the Swedish Research Council. The interview has also led to the development of apps.

She has served on the British Psychological Society''s Committee on Training in Clinical Psychology.