She is the first woman appointed as professor in engineering in British Columbia. She has around 40 years of post-doctoral experience in education, research and leadership. Her research contributions are in broad areas of signal processing, including signal detection; image encoding, recognition, and restoration, and their applications in cable TV, HDTV, medical imaging, infant cry signals, and brain computer interfaces. Dr. Ward has published upwards of 240 refereed journal papers, 350 refereed conference articles, and holds eight patents related to monitoring, measurement, and noise reduction concerning cable television. Some of her work has been licensed to US and Canadian industry.

She has supervised 47 Ph.D. and 50 Master students. She has served and provided leadership to IEEE and other professional societies. She was President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2016-2017) and IEEE Director Division 1X (2020-2021).