Prof Helen Ross - University of Queensland - Social SEP

Healthy Land & Water Science Committee.

Professor Helen Ross - Science Committee

Professor Helen Ross is an environmental psychologist specialising in the social aspects of sustainable development and environmental management. She manages social sciences in the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, at the University of Queensland, where she is responsible for rural development. In her research, she focuses particularly on community development and collaboration processes for natural resource management. In teaching, she is responsible for a master's degree program in Rural Development, teaches about environment and community, and supervises PhD students.

Much of Prof Helen Ross’s research is participatory and fosters collaboration between communities and governments focusing particularly on people-environment relationships, sustainability and resilience, and collaboration processes for natural resource management and rural development. She also conducts research on social aspects of water management and climate change adaptation.

Her recent projects include studies of community resilience in two regions of Australia, capacity building for Integrated Water Resource Management in the Pacific, and theoretical papers on resilience. Her current projects, with collaborators, are on collaboration as a solution to wicked policy problems, and managing Moreton Bay (Brisbane area) as a social-ecological system.

She is a Fellow of the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand, and in 2013 won the Institute’s Simon Molesworth Award for contribution to Environmental Management at national level. She is a member of Healthy Land & Water’s Scientific Committee, the Australian Psychological Society’s Climate Change Reference Group, UNESCO’s International Experts Group on Urban Futures, and a Global Change Institute researcher.

She is also Co-editor of the Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, a board member of Architectural Science Reviews and International Perspectives on Psychology, and a former editorial board member of Society and Natural Resources.

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