Professor Sandra Walklate is a Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre Research Affiliate.

Previously, Sandra was Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University of Liverpool as well as Chair of Criminology at Monash University in Victoria, Australia where she was a lead international researcher within the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre. Sandra holds adjunct roles at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane and the Research Center on Violence, University of West Virginia, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Observatory Permanent Violence and Crime (OPVC), University Fernando Pessoa (UFP), Porto, Portugal.

Sandra has worked within the field of victimology since the early 1980s and much of her current work in this area focuses on gender-based violence and criminal justice policy responses to this. She was elected as a Fellow to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2005, awarded the British Society of Criminology’s outstanding achievement award in 2014, and from July 2019 until June 2023 was President of the British Society of Criminology.

Prior to her retirement, Sandra was a co-investigator at the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, working on the “Policing, Vulnerabilities and Domestic Abuse: Victims, Perpetrators, Interventions” project. The project explored emerging approaches to policing perpetrators of domestic abuse and delivering safer outcomes for victim-survivors.

Along with Professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Sandra brings an international profile to the work of the Centre by exploring what lessons might be learned from policing responses in Australia to inform those responses in England and Wales.