Franziska is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work, and Extraordinary Professor at Optentia Research Unit, North-West University, South Africa and Honorary Associate Professor at Wits University South Africa. She is currently funded by an ERC Starting Grant and a GCRF Grant. Prior to that she held an ESRC Future Research Leaders Award. Her research focus is on prevalence, risk and protective factors of child maltreatment in vulnerable populations in sub-Saharan Africa, health outcomes of violence exposure in childhood, childhood violence prevention and on the development and testing of global child abuse measures. In 2016 she won the ISPCAN C. Henry Kempe Award for outstanding young professional in the field of child abuse and neglect. 

Prior to coming to Edinburgh, Franziska was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Interventions at the University of Oxford. Franziska holds a DPhil in Social Interventions (University of Oxford, 2014), an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Interventions (University of Oxford, 2010) and a BA in Social Work (Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, 2008). Franziska has worked as a child protection social worker for a local authority in Wales. She is a registered social worker with the HCPC and is an elected councilor of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN).

Current research projects include:

ERC Starting Grant 2019 (2020-2025): Interrupting the intergenerational transmission of violence in South Africa. Principal Investigator.

GCRF Hub Grant (2019-2024): Accelerating Achievement for Africa's Adolescents.

ESRC Future Research Leaders Award (2017-2019): Evidence-based child abuse prevention: Developing measures for observation and evaluation in a global context.  Principal Investigator.

Australian National health and Medical Research Council (2019-2023): The first national study of child abuse and neglect in Australia: prevalence, health outcomes, and burden of disease. Co-Investigator together with Professor Ben Mathews (QUT), Dr Rosana Pacella (University of Chichester), Professor Michael Dunne (QUT), Associate Professor James Scott (UQ), Professor David Finkelhor (University of New Hampshire), Professor Daryl Higgins (Australian Catholic University), Dr Holly Erskine (UQ), and Dr Hannah Thomas (Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research).