Anne Marie Ward is Professor of Accounting at Ulster University.  She has long-standing links with Chartered Accountants Ireland. She has written professional publications for their technical department, has taught on their professional education courses and regularly feeds into syllabus design when authoring her textbook, Finance Theory and Practice. This textbook is recommended by Chartered Accountants Ireland for courses seeking exemptions from their professional examinations and as such is adopted in most higher education institutions in Ireland. In addition, to disseminate her work to the profession, Professor Ward has published several articles in relevant professional journals and won the award for best article published in 2014.

 Professor Ward is regarded as one of the leading (co)authors of academic accounting textbooks, including Finance Theory and Practice (4 editions), Introduction to Financial Accounting (9 editions), Financial Accounting and Reporting: An International Approach and An Introduction to Personal Finance (4 editions). Her textbooks are adopted in over 40 institutions in the UK and Ireland and also have international adoptions in China, Malaysia and mainland Europe.

 Professor Ward’s main research interest is the social economy and financial inclusion, in particular the governance and performance of non-profit, member-owned, cooperative credit unions. She has contributed substantially to the literature in this area and is regarded as one of the leading academics on the subject.  Professor Ward collaborates with the Irish League of Credit Unions and the Ulster Federation of Credit Unions to foster knowledge exchange within the sector in Northern Ireland.

 Professor Ward has been involved in six successful grant projects worth a total of over £200,000 and is the author of over 100 publications including academic articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Business Ethics, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Journal of Business, Finance and Accounting, Studies in Higher Education, Financial Accountability and Management and British Accounting Review. She has also authored policy research reports and chapters in peer-reviewed research texts or encyclopaedias.

 In recent years, Professor Ward has widened her research interests and is currently working on research projects in the areas of social return on investment, doctoral education, CSR and gender.  She has published peer-reviewed articles on these topics and is currently supervising doctoral students in these areas.