 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.She went to Yale University for her graduate studies, also visiting the Mittag-Leffler Institute as a student, and completed her doctorate at Yale in 1994.Her dissertation, "Fuchsian Groups, Quasiconformal Groups, and Conical Limit Sets", was supervised by Peter Jones.