Walker Ladd

Dr. Walker Ladd is Chair of the Department of Research at Saybrook University, where she provides strategic leadership for the university's interdisciplinary research curriculum serving graduate and doctoral students across the College of Social Sciences and the College of Integrative Medicine and Health Sciences. Since joining the faculty in 2018, she has led initiatives that strengthen research education, advance innovative teaching practices, and support student success throughout the dissertation process.

Dr. Ladd's professional journey reflects a lifelong commitment to creativity, learning, and human development. She began her career as a professional modern dancer, earning both a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She later transitioned into psychology, completing a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University Seattle and practicing as a couples and family therapist before earning her Ph.D. in Psychology from Sofia University (formerly the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology).

An innovative academic leader, Dr. Ladd developed Saybrook's Specialization in Teaching and Advanced Research (STAR), a learner-centered academic specialization that prepares future faculty and scholar-practitioners for careers in higher education. The program equips learners with practical skills in university teaching, curriculum design, grant writing, scholarly publishing, and academic leadership while fostering reflective, humanistic approaches to education.

As a qualitative researcher and educator, Dr. Ladd has spent nearly a decade designing research curricula and mentoring doctoral researchers. Her methodological expertise includes hermeneutic phenomenology, interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), narrative inquiry, autoethnography, heuristic inquiry, constructivist and Straussian grounded theory, and qualitative research design. From 2020 to 2026, she served as an editor for *The Qualitative Report*, contributing to the advancement of qualitative scholarship across disciplines.

Dr. Ladd's research focuses primarily on maternal mental health and the lived experiences of women during the perinatal period. Her scholarship has explored the stigma experienced by mothers living with bipolar disorder, the long-term meaning of postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic, and compassion among hospital-based birth doulas. She is currently conducting an interpretative phenomenological study examining the lived experience of provider-recommended labor induction among nulliparous women aged 35 years and older.

She is also the author of the award-winning book *Transformed by Postpartum Depression: Women's Stories of Trauma and Growth* (Praeclarus Press, 2020), which emerged from her grounded theory research exploring trauma, recovery, and posttraumatic growth among women who experienced untreated perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.

Dr. Ladd's leadership and scholarship have been recognized through numerous honors, including the Saybrook University Faculty Excellence Award (2022-2023), a postgraduate certificate in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from Cornell University, and the 2026 Exemplary Humanistic Educator Award. Through her teaching, research, and academic leadership, she remains committed to advancing humanistic education, cultivating the next generation of scholars, and improving maternal health through meaningful qualitative inquiry.