Emeritus Professor Helen Ross
Building 8117A, Room 207, Gatton campus
Teaching and development
- Program Coordinator Rural Development programs
- AGRC7045 Research Methodologies
- AGRC7047 Global Challenges in Agriculture
- MGTS1982 Working with groups and teams
Researcher biography
Professor Helen Ross manages social sciences in the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, the University of Queensland. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist (environmental psychologist and anthropologist) specialising in social aspects of sustainable rural development, including shared responsibility for agricultural extension. In teaching, she is responsible for a Masters degree program in Rural Development, teaches about environment and community, and supervises PhD students. In her research she focuses 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 research 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 HealthyWaterways Scientific Experts Panel, 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.