Kerry Carrington is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Law and Society at the University of Sunshine Coast. She is also a Senior Associate for Outside Opinion and a mentor coach for ENVISAGE. Before this, she was Head of the School of Justice at QUT for 11 years, from 2009 to 2021. Throughout her career, she has acquired extensive mentoring experience. She has also led 8 Australian Research Grants worth $1.5 million, successfully undertaking large cross-cultural research projects nationally and internationally and establishing the first online A-ranked journal in criminology in the Global South. At 60, she retired from full-time academia to move to the coast, where she volunteers as a surf lifesaver.
Over the past thirty years, Kerry has established herself as a leading expert in policing and preventing domestic family violence. She was the youngest of six children and the first to go to university, thanks to Gough Whitlam’s reforms that made higher education free and not just for the rich. From age 15, she was independent and became responsible for the care of her brother, who had been wrongly admitted to a mental asylum for being gay and later committed suicide. Over her career, she struggled with the culture of the university environment, where many academics came from sheltered, privileged backgrounds.
Despite her disadvantage, Kerry Carrington was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia in 2016 for her outstanding and distinguished contributions to the social sciences. In 2015, she was named one of Queensland's best thinkers. In 2013 and 2014, she received two awards from the American Society of Criminology, including the Lifetime Achievement Award (Division of Critical Criminology) and the Distinguished Scholar Award (Division of Women and Crime). Kerry has around 150 publications, which can be viewed on ORCID.