[2] Despite finishing high school with the highest marks in her year in Lebanon, Ward was refused admission to the engineering program at the American University of Beirut because she was a woman.

She worked briefly for the Ministry of Hydro-Electric Resources in Beirut before coming to the University of California, Berkeley for graduate study in electrical engineering and computer science,[1][3] where she earned a master's degree in 1969 and completed her PhD in 1972.

[3] She moved to Vancouver following her husband, a civil engineer who had obtained a faculty position at the University of British Columbia while she had been unsuccessful in her own academic job search.

[3] She was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 1999, "for contributions to digital signal processing applications in television and medical imaging".

[5] She was elected as an international member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2020, "for innovative applications of signal processing to industrial and bioengineering problems".