Professor Karl Roberts

Biography

Professor Karl Roberts joined UNE in January 2024, as Head of the School of Health and Professor of Health and Wellbeing. He is a behavioural scientist (forensic psychology) and medical statistician committed to multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to health, wellbeing policy and practice. Taking a multilevel systems approach, he has over thirty years’ experience applying behavioural insights at the interface between healthcare, security, policy, and practice. He has wide-ranging interests in the impact of dual use and disruptive technologies, one health, the interface between security and health, and violence prevention. He is also interested in systems theory and complex systems applied to health.

Karl has over thirty years-experience working in academia at institutions in Australia, the UK and USA. He has also acted as an advisor for various international bodies and governments on issue related to wellbeing, violence prevention and professional practice. Notably, this has included working with policing agencies, developing policy and practice on suicide, stalking, and homicide prevention. Interpol developing guidance for organisational responses to deliberate events such as biological weapon use. The UK government SAGE advisory group throughout the Covid19 pandemic focusing upon security planning. The European Union advising on biological terrorism, and extremist use of AI. World Health Organisation where he worked in a unit developing policy and practice related to deliberate biological threat events. Karl also chaired a New South Wales review into policing hate crime and right-wing terrorism.

Karl’s contribution has been recognised through a number of honorary academic appointments including Adjunct Professor of Pacific Policing at the University of the South Pacific, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for the future of Knowledge University of Johannesburg. He has also been an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts, and has had honorary teaching roles at Oxford, Harvard, and Brown Universities.

Karl has a BSc honours in Psychology, an MSc in Forensic Psychology, an MSc in Medical Statistics, and a PhD in Psychology.  He is an associate fellow and a Chartered Forensic Psychologist of the British Psychological Society, and a fellow of the higher education academy. He is also a trained hostage negotiator and has completed the Harvard negotiations program.