Draft:Jamie Lachman

Dr. Jamie Lachman

Early Life

Dr Jamie Lachman was born in South Africa in 1975 and later moved to the USA. He was educated firstly at Yale University, where he obtained a BA (Distinction) in American Studies. He then went to the University of Oxford, where he obtained an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and as a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford he obtained a D.Phil. in Social Intervention. He recently married his wife in a wonderful ceremony in Greece.

Career

In 2004 he founded Clowns Without Borders, South Africa, a not for profit organisation and a member of the Clowns Without Borders National Federation. Clowns Without Borders South Africa was started when he met Moshe Cohen, the Founder of Clowns Without Borders - USA in New York and took 3 Clowns from the US and Ireland back to South Africa for a 3 week trip, where they met a number of organisations and undertook many performance for over 3000 children. Following this initial trip, Project Njabulo was created to focus on children affected by HIV/AIDS. The funding for this project came from benefactors in the USA. In 2007, he and other local artists formed Clowns Without Borders South Africa after participating in a cultural exchange project called Circus Life South Africa in Durban. They collaborated with CWB-USA to perform shows for thousands of children in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. They also developed programmes to offer psychosocial support to children and their guardians affected by HIV/AIDS in partnership with Woza Moya Project and Robs Smetherham Bereavement Service for Children.

In 2015 he took up a Research Officer post within the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at University of Oxford and in 2017 transferred to the University of Glasgow as a research Fellow in the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit. In 2021 he returned to the University of Oxford as a Senior Research and Teaching Fellow, again in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention.

At Oxford, he is the lead principal investigator of the Global Parenting Initiative, a five year, $22million project that aims to improve the quality and impact of playful parenting interventions in low- and middle-income countries and also leads several research projects in different countries across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Additionally, he is the CEO and co-founder of Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH), a social enterprise that collaborates with World Health Organisation and UNICEF to support the implementation of parenting programmes in the Global South. He co-led an international team that developed and disseminated free and evidence-based parenting resources to help millions of people in almost 200 countries and territories cope with the challenges of COVID-19 on child wellbeing and violence prevention.

Publications

A full list of Dr Lachman's academic publications can be found here but those of note are as follows:-

"Before I was like Tarzan, but now I take a pause"

"Parenting interventions promoting child protection and development for pre-school age children"

"Climate change is a threat multiplier for violence against children"

"How are parental mental health and parenting practices associated with externalizing behaviours among young children with autism in China?"

"Integrating intimate partner violence prevention content into a digital parenting chatbot intervention during COVID-19"

Awards

During the course of his career, Dr Lachman has won many awards. Those of note are as follows:-

2022 - The NOAM Chomsky Global Connections - winner of the Humanitarian award

2022 - Oxford University Vice Chancellor's Award for Innovation and Engagement

2021 - United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council Celebrating Impact Winner, Panel’s Choice

2021 - O2RB Excellence in Impact Award for Scale-up of evidence-based parenting programmes for more than 193 million people during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry Best Paper Award from the Association of Child and Adolescent Mental Health