Griffith University

Education

• PhD (Behavioural Sciences), Macquarie University, 1985
• MSc (Mathematical Statistics), Univeristy of Sydney, 1973
• BSc (Hons), University of Sydney, 1970

Employment History

Current
Ross Homel is Foundation Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and Director of the University???s Strategic Research Program in the Social and Behavioural Sciences, a virtual Institute of our 200 research and academic staff in either research centres.

2004 - 2007
Director of the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance at Griffith, and he also served as Head of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice between 1993 and 1996 and in 2002 and 2003.

2003
In July he took on a half-time role for 12 months with the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY), to help develop a set of national research priorities to advance the wellbeing of children and young people, and to set up a new Australian Research Council research network on behalf of the Alliance (the ARACY ARC/NHMRC Research Network - Future Generation).

Prior to 2002
He was editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology from 1992 to 1995, and was a part-time Commissioner of the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission from February 1994 to April 1999. 

Research

Since taking up his appointment at Griffith University in 1992 Professor Homel has made a major contribution to the development of criminology at that university as a new, interdisciplinary, strongly research-based discipline. Apart from consolidating a large undergraduate program, he played a key role in establishing the PhD program as well as the Centre for Crime Policy and Public Safety as ways of focusing and increasing research activity. The Centre merged with two other University centres in 1999 when the application to the Australian Research Council for Key Centre funding was successful, further increasing the research profile of the School.

Professor Homel's career focus is the theoretical analysis of crime and associated problems such as violence, child abuse, injury, substance abuse and corruption, and the prevention of these problems through the application of the scientific method to problem analysis and the development, implementation and evaluation of interventions. He is particularly interested in prevention projects implemented through community development methods at the local level, and is co-director (with Dr Kate Freiberg and Cherie Lamb) of a large early intervention project in a disadvantaged area of Brisbane (the Pathways to Prevention Project). In 2004 this project, which he developed in partnership with Mission Australia, won equal first prize in the National Crime and Violence Prevention Awards.

Publications

Professor Homel has authored or co-authored 3 books, 4 edited books, 60 refereed articles and 34 refereed book chapters, 32 major reports or monographs, and 51 editorials, commentaries, book reviews, lectures, policy papers, conference papers and encyclopaedia articles. He has also delivered more than 60 invited conference papers around the world since 2000, mostly on the theme of developmental prevention. The 1999 research report, Pathways to Prevention (National Crime Prevention, Canberra) (completed with colleagues from developmental psychology, social work and sociology), has attracted wide attention in Australia and overseas, as has the recent report The Pathways to Prevention Project: The First Five Years, 1999-2004, published in partnership with Mission Australia.

Apart from these reports and papers, he has conducted research and carried out program evaluations on the wellbeing of children, families and young people for many years. In the 1970s, with Professor Tony Vinson he developed social indicators of community wellbeing for areas throughout NSW, and in the 1980s did extensive work with developmental psychologists at Macquarie University (Ailsa Burns and Jacqueline Goodnow) on the social adjustment and quality of life of 9-11 year old children and their families in Sydney. This work, conducted through the Sydney Area Family Study, established that neighbourhood risk (cumulative disadvantage) was a persistent predictor of individual and family wellbeing after allowing for individual risk factors. In the 1990s, Professor Homel designed and evaluated numerous community projects directed at the health and wellbeing of young people, including (with colleague Dr Marg Hauritz) the YACCA program (Youth and Community Combined Action Projects for crime prevention), and the safety action projects to create safer entertainment venues for young people in Surfers Paradise and north Queensland (with Dr Gillian McIlwain, Dr Marg Hauritz, and Russell Carvolth from Queensland Health). He is also a chief investigator on numerous projects funded by the Australian Research Council, mostly related to juvenile crime and crime prevention.

Awards and Honours

2008

• 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.???
• 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???.

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.
• Appointed to the Board of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

• Elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
• First prize, National Crime and Violence Prevention Award (Pathways to Prevention).
  

• Winner of a National Road Safety Award for 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.

Interests 

He is married with four children, and lives in Brisbane, Queensland. He has an active interest in community affairs, and has served as a Parents and Citizens President, Uniting Church elder, and member of several community action groups. He is an adviser on many crime prevention programs, and is a member of several state, national and international committees on crime and substance abuse prevention and child and family policy.