Catharine Ward Thompson is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Co-Director of OPENspace Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh.  Her work focuses on inclusive access to outdoor environments and links between landscape and health. It includes work with children, young people and older people; it covers environment-behaviour interactions, historic landscapes and contemporary needs, and salutogenic environments. She was a member of the Scottish Government’s Good Places Better Health Evaluation Group.

Catharine directed the I’DGO (Inclusive Design for Getting Outdoors) research consortium focused on the benefits and barriers to getting outdoors for older people and their quality of life www.idgo.ac.uk. This was followed by a project looking at Mobility, Mood and Place for older people www.mobilitymoodplace.ac.uk with an emphasis on positive experiences and restorative outdoor environments. Current research with older people is exploring the person ageing in place as part of the University's Advanced Care Research Centre (ACRC).

Catharine's research on the relationship between the quality, quantity and accessibility of green space and people’s health and wellbeing showed relationships between objective (cortisol) measures of health and objective mapping of green space levels in the residential environment, as part of the GreenHealth project for Scottish Government. Recent projects funded by NIHR and ESRC, in collaboration with the Forestry Commission  Scotland (now Scottish Forestry), are exploring whether an urban woodland intervention programme improves psychological wellbeing and early childhood development in deprived communities. She is currently an investigator on GroundsWell: a major, UKPRP funded collaboration to prevent non-communicable disease through the health-supporting benefits of access to urban green and blue space.

Contact me on Linked In at linkedin.com/in/catharine-ward-thompson-2a3b26a

Contact me on Mastadon @cwardthompson@mastodon.social