Professor Tammi Walker is a Professor of Forensic Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Durham University, UK. She holds Fellow and Chartered Psychologist status with the British Psychological Society (BPS), is a qualified mental health nurse, and is a Registered Senior Fellow with Advance HE. She completed her PhD in 2006, specialising in women, self-harm, and borderline personality disorder. With over 20 years of experience researching and working in prison and secure care settings, including maximum security facilities for recidivistic sexual and violent offenders, her expertise is extensive. She was the lead author of  Preventing Self-injury and Suicide in Women’s Prisons, which received the BPS Practitioner Text award for its significant contribution to understanding and addressing self-harm and suicide among incarcerated women. She continues to write extensively in this area and undertakes funded applied psychological research.

Tammi leads the Health and Justice Forensic Research Lab at Durham University, a multi-disciplinary team dedicated to studying adults, with a particular focus on women, who are in contact with prisons and forensic mental health services.  Her funded research projects are supported by organisations like the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), and one example is the WORSHIP II study, which she co-authored and was a pivotal self-harm study in the UK. It was designed as a pilot to test the feasibility of a specific therapeutic intervention—Psychodynamic Interpersonal Therapy (PIT)—for women in prison who self-harm. The pilot’s success was crucial as it paved the way for the WORSHIP III trial, which became the first large-scale randomised controlled trial of its kind in the UK.