Cecilia Essau

Biography

"Cecilia A. Essau was born and raised in the tropical jungle of Borneo Island. She received her early education in Sarawak, Malaysia and after completing her O-Level she went to Canada where she did her Highschool Diploma at Hillcrest Highschool in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts Degree (1983), her Honours Bachelor of Arts Degree (1984) and her Master of Arts degree (1985) from Lakehead University (Canada), her Ph.D. (1992) from the University of Konstanz (Germany), and her post-doctoral degree in Psychology (qualification for tenure-track professorships in Germany: Habilitation, 2000) from the University of Bremen (Germany). She is the first Iban woman to have received a PhD. She has held a number of academic positions in Canadian (Lakehead University), Austrian (Karl-Franzens University Graz), and German (Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry, University of Konstanz, University of Bremen, Technical University Braunschweig, University of Muenster) universities before joining the University of Roehampton in May 2004 as a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology. At Roehampton, she is also the Director of Centre for Applied Research and Assessment in Child and Adolescent Wellbeing (CARACAW), and Research Degrees Convener in the Department of Psychology. In 2011, she was made Fellow of the British Psychological Society in recognition of her contribution to the field of Psychology. In 2013, she was awarded the Norman Munn Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award by Flinders University, Australia. In 2015, she was awarded the Florey Medical Research Foundation Mental Health Visiting Professor by the University of Adelaide, Australia. With research grants from numerous national and international institutions, her research has focused on understanding the interacting factors that can lead children and adolescents to have serious emotional and behavioural 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. She is the author of over 220 articles, and is the author/editor of 19 books in the area of youth mental health."

Research Interest

Professor Essau's research interests are in the broad area of Developmental Psychopathology and Cross-cultural Psychology. She has over 20 on-going projects, most of which are conducted in collaboration with her colleagues in different centers around the globe: Child and Adolescent Mental Health (e.g., anxiety, depression, conduct problems, ADHD, substance misuse), Comorbidity of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, Domestic Violence, Prevention/Intervention of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, Williams Syndrome, Psychopathic Traits (e.g., callous und unemotional traits), Parenting Practice, Cross-cultural Psychology, Assessment, Mental Health Literacy, Procrastination, Applied Developmental Psychology