Mary W. Hicks

Mary Ward Hicks (1920 – circa 2018 ) was an American psychologist specializing in family therapy, and a professor emerita at Florida State University.

Early life and education Mary Agnes Ward was born in Nyssa, Oregon and raised in Weiser, Idaho, the daughter of George P. Ward and Marian E. McDonald Ward (later Gribbin). She attended Whitman College and studied education as an undergraduate at the University of Idaho, graduating in 1942. She was a member of the Delta Gamma sorority at Idaho.

Hicks earned a master's degree in educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1953, and completed a Ph.D. in child development and family relations at Pennsylvania State University.

Career Hicks taught at Gooding High School after college. As director of the university's Marriage and Family Therapy Center, she commented on changing laws around marriage in the news, and spoke at community events.

Recognition Hicks was the 1974 winner of the Ernest G. Osborne Teaching Award of the National Council on Family Relations, and the 2003 winner of the Training Award of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. In 1995, she received the Distinguished Service to Families Award from the Southeastern Council on Family Relations. and named as a lifetime member of the Conference in 2011. An outdoor bench at Florida State is dedicated with a plaque in her honor. There is a Mary Hicks Endowed Scholarship Fund at Florida State, to support doctoral students in the Marriage and Family Therapy program.

Personal life Mary Ward married poultry geneticist Amp Frank Hicks Jr., in 1945. They had two daughters, Lorna and Julie. Mary Ward died in 2017, at the age of 97.

Also published as Volume 10, issue 4 of Contemporary Family Therapy, December 1988.