Sirpa Virta is Professor of Policing and Security Governance at Tampere University, Finland. She was in charge of the Master’s Programme of Police Management from 2005-2018, tailored for Finnish senior police officers. She has been involved in European police education (CEPOL, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training) since 2001 as a higher police education expert and instructor. From 2019 – 2022 she was in charge of the international Master’s Programme SAFER (Security and Safety Management).

Sirpa Virta is political scientist by education. Police and policing research has been her main research interest since 1986 and her doctoral dissertation was titled The Police and a Society of Security (1998, in Finnish). In 1996 she spent several weeks collecting comparative data for the dissertation in New Scotland Yard and in the Home Office, London. Professor Virta has been and is a member and leader of many international research projects and networks. She has published a lot of articles and books on community policing, police management and security governance, and theoretical articles combining political science and criminological approaches, for instance in Theoretical Criminology (2004) and British Journal of Criminology (2016).