Andrew McGrath is an Associate Professor in Psychology at Charles Sturt University. He has a longstanding interest in juvenile delinquency dating to his Honours research on the correlates of offending frequency in a group of young people in NSW, and his PhD research, in which he interviewed 200 hundred young people immediately subsequent to their appearance before the NSW Children’s Court for sentencing. A journal article based on this research was later awarded the Allen Austin Bartholomew Award for best article published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology in 2009. Since then he has published a number of articles in both Australian and International journals on topics ranging from the impact of custodial penalties on re-offending, the sentencing of young Indigenous offenders, serious and violent offending careers, and juvenile risk assessment.

Associate Professor McGrath specialises in quantitative methodology and is familiar with a range of advanced analytic techniques used in criminological and psychological research. He has a history of successful research collaborations with NSW governmental agencies such as the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research and the NSW Department of Justice (Juvenile Justice). He is currently collaborating with colleagues on a long-term project examining the relationship between out-of-home care and the criminal justice system and as part of this project has interviewed police officers, Magistrates, and juvenile justice workers.