Our Team
Professor Mark R. Kebbell
Founder
Mark Kebbell is Professor of Forensic Psychology at the School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University. His expertise and research is in the area of Investigative Psychology particularly with regards the investigation and prosecution of serious crime.
His previous work has included writing the guidelines for police officers in England and Wales (with Wagstaff) for assessing witness evidence, and developing risk assessment methods for suspected sex offenders for the Australian Federal Police and the Queensland Police Service.
He has worked on more than seventy criminal cases, principally involving murder or serious sexual assault, and has given expert evidence on numerous occasions including uncontested psychological evidence in an Old Bailey appeal case. He is a Registered Psychologist in Australia and a Chartered Forensic Psychologist in the United Kingdom.
Academically, the quality of his work has been recognised by the award of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for Outstanding Younger Scholars. He is the Editor, with Professor Graham Davies of the book 'Practical Psychology for Forensic Investigations and Prosecutions' published by Wiley.
Associate Professor Carleen Thompson
Carleen Thompson is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and a Member of the Griffith Criminology Institute (GCI) at Griffith University. Carleen is Co-Lead of the Queensland Cross-Sector Research Collaboration (QCRC) and a Project Investigator in the 'Transforming Corrections to Transform Lives' Centre. Carleen is a member of the Social Analytics Lab (SAL) Committee, and is the data lead for the QCRC and TCTL SAL holdings. Carleen is Co-Lead of one of GCI's three core Research Programs 'Safer Societies'. Carleen’s research aims to improve understanding of the causes and progression of offending to drive evidence-based intervention planning that reduces re-offending. Carleen has established strong partnerships across government departments, with 20 years’ experience using her research to help policy-makers and practitioners more effectively target interventions on the basis of offenders’ risks and needs. Her research has led to state-wide changes in risk assessment practices across adult corrections, youth justice and child protection, as well as reforms to frontline policing responses to low-risk offenders. Risk screening tools she developed have been used in Corrective Services throughout Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia for more than a decade.
Dr James Ogilvie
Dr Ogilvie is a psychologist and lecturer in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University. His current research is focused on examining the intersection of mental illness and offending using population-level linked administrative datasets from criminal justice and health agencies. His broader research interests are on the causes of youth offending and the development, implementation and evaluation of interventions to reduce reoffending. Dr Ogilvie previously worked for 10 years as a practitioner (psychologist) with the Griffith Youth Forensic Service (GYFS), which operates as a joint partnership between Griffith University and the Queensland Government Department of Youth Justice to deliver assessment and treatment services for young people who have engaged in sexually harmful behaviour. He specialised in the delivery of assessment and treatment services in remote Indigenous communities. In this role, Dr Ogilvie gained extensive experience in the assessment and treatment of sexual violence committed by youth, including collaboration with families and community services to reduce the risk of reoffending and improve the outcomes for youth. Given his clinical background, Dr Ogilvie places a strong emphasis on the development of evidence-based practice.
Ashley Phelan
Ashley Phelan is the Manager of the Forensic Behavioural Services Unit, Child Abuse and Sexual Crime Group, Queensland Police, and an Adjunct at the University of Queensland.
Ashley joined the Queensland Police Service in 2019 and has over 28 years of experience in the field of forensic, psychological, and biomedical science. Ashley has worked within, taught, trained, and consulted on a wide range of topics within the field of forensic behavioural science throughout Australia and Internationally, primarily across child sexual offending, homicide, and high harm offending.
Ashley has provided forensic advice to all levels of Government, the Judiciary, Police and Corrections throughout Australia and internationally. Ashley has codesigned and developed complex harm assessment tools used operationally by police and continues to research the implications of neurodivergence in high harm offending cohorts, Machiavellian child sexual offenders, and predictors of sexual recidivism in the absence of measurable criminality.
Rebecca Howard
Lab Manager; PhD Candidate
Rebecca Howard is a Research Assistant and Ph.D. candidate at Griffith University, Australia. She obtained a Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) in 2024, and won the Australian Psychological Society’s ‘APS Prize’ for her thesis ‘Examining Intimate Partner Violence Typologies’. Her doctoral research examines links between suicidal ideation/behaviours and perpetration of severe domestic and family violence and domestic homicide, with particular emphasis on identifying suicidal markers as a risk factor for lethal family violence.
Lindsy Lethbridge
PhD Candidate
Lindsy Lethbridge has a Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) and is a current PhD Candidate in the School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University. Lindsy’s research interests focus on understanding how and why individuals engage in crime across the life course, with an emphasis on prevention and harm reduction. Her doctoral research examines the highest-harm intimate partner violence offenders in Queensland, including those responsible for acute and cumulative harm, to inform risk assessment and intervention.
Krittika Vongkiatkajorn
Krittika Vongkiatkajorn is a psychology researcher whose work focuses on the social determinants of health, including the role of relationships (and their absence) in mental health and well-being. She has extensive experience in project operations, evaluation administration, ethics, data management, and mixed-methods research.
Most recently, she served as project manager for two major research projects at the Queensland Children’s Hospital, in collaboration with Griffith University and the University of Queensland, overseeing the full delivery of studies on perioperative anxiety in children and the development of a new model of care for needle phobia in neurodivergent children.
In these roles, she managed all aspects of the research lifecycle, including project planning, evaluation administration, stakeholder engagement, ethics submissions, data management, and overall management of project timelines and milestones. Prior to her research career, she held senior project roles in the resources sector, where she led the Continuous Improvement Team at BHP and was responsible for operational governance, project tracking and reporting, and driving performance improvement.
Maddison Cross
Honours Student
Maddison is a Psychology Honours student at Griffith University with a strong interest in youth justice, corrections and developmental criminology. She is especially interested in understanding the pathways that lead to serious offending and how research can inform effective prevention and rehabilitation strategies.