Dr. Ward has taught at Merrimack College for ten years and is an internationally recognized publicly engaged scholar.  Dr. Ward is currently the coordinator for the American Council on Education’s Carnegie Elective Classifications Research Lab to advance the public purposes of higher education and serves on the National Advisory Committee for the Carnegie Elective Community Engagement Classification. She is also an Equity and Engagement Fellow with Campus Compact; co-facilitator for theInternational Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement’s Alliance for Engaged Colleges and Universities; a visiting senior fellow at the Institute for Community and Economic Development at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, co-founder of the New England Equity and Engagement Consortium; a visiting researcher at UMass Lowell’s Center for Population Health; serves on the City of Lawrence Mayor’s Health Task Force research subcommittee; the advisory committee for the Lawrence Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP); a Healthy Active Living Working Group member; is an external evaluator for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) City of Lawrence Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH); and serves locally on her town’s Council on Aging and for many years has volunteered for her daughters’ schools and sports teams. 

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Dr. Ward’s recent publications include Anti-racist Community Engagement Principles and Practices, Legacy Lived: A Generation of Ernest A. Lynton Award Recipients Advancing Community-Engaged Scholarship and Institutional Change; Publicly Engaged Scholars: Next-Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education.