Ross Homel

EMERITUS PROFESSOR ROSS HOMEL AO

Ross Homel was appointed Foundation Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in 1992, and Professor Emeritus in November 2021. Professor Homel is a highly cited social scientist, having published approximately 250 books, edited volumes, peer-reviewed papers, chapters, and high impact government reports. He is a former Commissioner of the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission; Head of the Griffith School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of various Griffith research centres and institutes; Vice-President of the Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences; is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology; and has recently been appointed as a Queensland Patron for the Justice Reform Initiative, a national movement focused on criminal justice reform.

He has won many awards for his research on the prevention of crime, violence and injuries, and the promotion of positive development and wellbeing for children and young people in socially disadvantaged communities. He won a national road safety award in 1995 for his research on drinking and driving and for his leadership in the early 1980s in developing and successfully advocating for the introduction of a form of mass random breath testing that is still actively enforced in all states and territories of Australia. Other major awards include the Sellin-Glueck Award in 2010 from the American Society of Criminology “for criminological scholarship that considers problems of crime and justice as they are manifested outside the United States.”

In 2008 he was appointed an Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia (AO) “for service to education, particularly in the field of criminology, through research into the causes of crime, early intervention and prevention methods.” In 2008 he was honoured by the Queensland Premier as a ‘Queensland Great’ “for his contribution to Queensland’s reputation for research excellence, the development of social policy and justice reform and helping Queensland’s disadvantaged communities.” In 2018 he received the Distinguished Criminologist Award from the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology “for outstanding, significant and sustained contributions to Australian criminology.”