Speaker Profile
Cecilia A. Essau

Cecilia A. Essau PhD

Psychology
London, England, United Kingdom

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Professor Cecilia A Essau, HBA, MA, Ph.D., Habilitation, SFHEA, CPsychol, FBPsS, is a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Roehampton, London, UK. She is a Visiting Professor at the School of Psychology at the University of Adelaide, working in collaboration with Prof Anna Chur-Hansen to continue the exciting work of the late Prof Robert Barrett on the psychology, psychiatric, and genetic research, among the Iban people in Sarawak.

Professor Essau was the first Iban woman ever to hold a Ph.D. and is the only Iban-speaking academic psychologist in the world. She received her early education in Sarawak, Malaysia and after completing her O-Level she went to Canada where she did her High School Diploma at Hillcrest High School in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts Degree, her Honours Bachelor of Arts Degree and her Master of Arts degree from Lakehead University (Canada), her Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz (Germany), and her “Habilitation” in Psychology (qualification for tenure-track professorships in Germany) from the University of Bremen (Germany). She has held a number of academic positions in Canadian, Austrian, and German universities before joining the University of Roehampton in 2004.

In 2011, she was made a Fellow of the British Psychological Society in recognition of her contribution to the field of Psychology. She is also a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Fellow of the Borneo Research Council. Her research has focused on understanding the interacting factors that can lead children and adolescents to have serious emotional and behavioral problems and using this research to (a) enhance the assessment of childhood and adolescent psychopathology and (b) design more effective interventions to prevent and treat such problems.
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