[1] Ward earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics with first class honours from Australian National University (ANU) in 1987; at ANU, she served as president of the Students' Association for 1984–1985.
[3] She worked as a G. C. Evans Instructor at Rice University from 1994 to 1997, overlapping with a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 1995.
She then joined the Harvey Mudd College mathematics faculty,[2] and in 2006 moved to the University of South Australia.
[4] She has also published highly cited work on the HITS algorithm for using link structure to rate web pages.
[5] Ward won the Henry L. Alder Award of the Mathematical Association of America] in 2006 for distinguished teaching as a beginning undergraduate teacher.