Our Team

Linda Richter, Professor, Advisory Board Member
Linda Richter is the Executive Director of Child, Youth and Family Development at the Human Sciences Research Council. She holds a Chair in Psychology and is an elected Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She has conducted both basic and policy research in the fields of child and youth development as applied to health, education, welfare and social development, and has published more than a 150 papers in the fields of child adolescent and family development, infant and child assessment, protein-energy malnutrition, street and working children, and the effects of HIV/AIDS on children and families, including HIV prevention among young people. Professor Richter is the Principal Investigator of Birth to Twenty, a longitudinal study of the maturation and development of more than two thousand young people, born in Soweto-Johannesburg in 1990, who are being followed up prospectively for 20 years. She is a co-author of a book on the study entitled Mandela’s Children: Growing up in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2001) and the lead editor of a recent book on the sexual abuse of prepubertal children entitled The Sexual Abuse of Young Children in Southern Africa (2004).

Dr. Richter serves on several national and international committees, including the Technical Steering Committee of the Department of Child and Adolescent Health and Development at the World Health Organization in Geneva and FutureThink, an expert consultation organized by the WHO to anticipate future threats to the health and wellbeing of children and adolescents. She has devised several innovative intervention programmes and has advised other agencies on the design, implementation and evaluation of interventions for extremely vulnerable children and families.

About Us • Children and AIDS • Grants Awarded • You Can Help • Apply for a Grant • Contact Us • Home