In 2022, when I turned 60, I retired from full-time academic work to become the Director of my own research consultancy. I was also appointed as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Law and Society at the University of Sunshine Coast. I joined Outside Opinion as a Senior Associate in the same year.

I have a 35-year career that includes experience as a senior research officer in the Australian Parliament, overseeing a unit within a statutory authority at the AIHW, and several decades in the tertiary education sector. Throughout my career, I have developed the ability to translate complex academic research into concise briefing papers for a diverse audience. Additionally, I convert my research into submissions to Parliament and Government inquiries to promote the adoption of my findings. I consider this skill a key factor in my success in the tertiary sector, where I have leveraged ARC grants and consultancies while building an extensive network across government, justice, and NGO sectors.

I have led 8 Australian Research Grants totalling $1.5 million over my career. I was the lead investigator of an ARC DP on ‘Preventing Gender Violence: Lessons from the Global South’. The team undertook a world-first study on how Specialist Police Stations in Argentina respond to and prevent gender violence, and what Australia can learn to improve its prevention of gender violence. I was also awarded a follow-up ARC Discovery on Improving the Policing of Gender Violence to continue this research.

I have published extensively throughout my career, including 13 books and 140 journal articles and book chapters, primarily in criminology, law and justice. My work has been cited 6,500 times on Google Scholar.  A jointly authored article on “Southern criminology” by Russell Hogg, Máximo Sozzo, and me, published in the British Journal of Criminology, has 560 citations in Scopus and 986 in Google Scholar. Compared with other publications in the same field, this publication is highly cited, receiving approximately 187 times the field average.

As a scholar, I have built a wide-ranging international and national network that collaborates to challenge the dominance of knowledge from English-speaking countries to bridge global divides. The commercialisation of knowledge through paywalled journals disadvantages many in the Global South. I am passionate about establishing and promoting open publishing and open science as strategic ways to level the playing field and democratise knowledge. This is why I was the founding editor of the International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, a successful gold-star open-access journal. I serve on the editorial boards of 10 journals, three published in Spanish and another seven in English.

I am comfortable working with multi-disciplinary teams across Law, Sociology, Social Policy, Social Work, Geography, Journalism, Psychology and Criminology. I specialise in the fields of gender violence and its prevention.