In January 2008 Professor Homel was appointed an Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia (AO). The AO was for “For service to education, particularly in the field of criminology, through research into the causes of crime, early intervention and prevention methods.”.

In June 2008 he was awarded a Queensland Great Award by the Queensland Premier.  Ross, who was one of five people honoured with this award, was nominated for “his research and community leadership that has made a significant contribution to Queensland’s reputation for research excellence, the development of social policy and justice reform and the lives of families in Queensland’s disadvantaged communities”.

In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and in 2007 was appointed to the Board of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

He is the winner of a 1995 National Road Safety Award for his research on random breath testing in New South Wales, and the research group at Griffith University that he established won Australian Violence Prevention Awards twice, in 1994 and 1998, for research on the causes and prevention of violence in drinking establishments. This work also attracted the Benjamin Award from Queensland Health in 1998.

In 2007 the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology awarded the Allen Austin Bartholomew Award to Professor Homel and Professor Alan France for their paper, 'Societal access routes and developmental pathways:  putting social structure and young people's voice into the analysis of pathways into and out of crime', ANZ Journal of Criminology (2006), Vol. 39(3). The Bartholomew Award is awarded annually for the best paper to appear in the ANZ Journal of Criminology.