Judith McFarlane, Dr.P.H., RN

Professor and Parry Nursing Chair in Health Promotion - Houston Center

Dr. Judith McFarlane is the Parry Chair in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at Texas Woman’s University in Houston, Texas in USA. Dr. McFarlane has her bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Florida and her doctorate from the University of Texas. Dr. McFarlane conducts research on the health effects of violence against women and children and the effectiveness of interventions to prevent further violence.

Dr. McFarlane’s research has been funded by the National Centre for Injury Prevention, Agency for Health Research & Quality, The National Institute of Justice, and National Institutes of Health in the US and international agencies, such as UNICEF and UKAID. Her research findings have been presented to congressional committees, cited on Cable News Network, and used globally to set standards of care for women and children. Her research findings are chronicled in more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.

Dr. McFarlane works internationally to design and evaluate community based programs to prevent violence against poor women in Pakistan where she is testing economic skill building as an intervention to interrupt abuse. Dr. McFarlane works with UNICEF in Zimbabwe to measure the impact of micro-finance, and was recently selected as a consultant to the UKAID, DIFD 5-year initiative in Africa and Asia to determine what works to prevent gender based violence. Dr. McFarlane has been a Visiting Scholar to capacity build research and guide community based research at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan for over 10 years and was selected as the Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at the School for Community Medicine at the University of Bristol, England in 2015. Dr. McFarlane was a Fulbright Senior Specialist to Bangladesh and South Africa in 2009 and 2013 respectively.

In 2011 Dr. McFarlane was funded with $2.6 million dollars to complete a 7-year study on abused women and children. The safety, work, health, and functioning of the women and their children is chronicled along with intergenerational impact of violence to offer evidence for global policy and practice standards. At year five of the study, 94% of this high-risk population is retained and over 30 peer-reviewed articles have been published on the findings, which are presented regularly to international audiences and used in many countries to promote the health and well-being of marginalized women and children.

Page last updated 11:07 AM, April 26, 2019