Prof Linda Richter

Linda Richter (Ph.D.) is a Developmental Psychologist appointed a Distinguished Professor in the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

She has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard (USA), Melbourne (Aus) and Oxford (UK) Universities, and from 1996-2001 she was a member, then Chair of the Technical Steering Committee of the Division of Child Health and Development at the World Health Organization in Geneva. She has served on various Wellcome Trust research selection committees since 2006. From 2010-2012 she was appointed as Advisor on Vulnerable Children at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Geneva. Linda is one of the original investigators and currently the co-Principal Investigator of the South African birth cohort study, Birth to Thirty (Bt30).

She led the research and drafting of South Africa’s Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy, adopted by Cabinet in 2015, and the 2017 Lancet Series Advancing Early Child Development: From Science to Scale. Linda currently leads the ECD Countdown to 2030 and the UKRI-funded project Harnessing Global Data to Advance Young Children’s Learning and Development. Linda has published more than 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and was the recipient of the South African Medical Research Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and of the SA National Research Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021.