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Biography

Claire Nee is Professor Emerita of Criminological Psychology. She joined the Department of Psychology in 1996 from the Home Office Research and Statistics Directorate. She founded the International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology in 1997 and was Director until 2021. 

Claire, with her team at СÀ¶ÊÓƵ, Vrije University and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime and Law, was the first in the world to use virtual reality to study criminal decision-making and behaviour as it happens. She is a visiting professor at both the Max Planck Institute at Freiburg and the Institute Phillipe Pinel in Montreal. With Professor Tony Ward (NZ) she developed the theory of Dysfunctional Expertise in offending behaviour. Claire has been Associate Editor of numerous peer reviewed journals and is currently on the editorial board of Criminology.

Research interests

Claire's research has included a variety of areas in correctional psychology, including crime-specific research (burglary and car theft); interventions in prisons; criminality in children; personality disorder in female offenders; electronic monitoring of offenders; intensive probation; self-reported offending; and racism and sexism within the police force. Her current research projects include virtual re-enactments of burglary and predatory sexual offending. She is a mixed methods researcher, with a heavy emphasis on phenomenology using virtual re-enactments, eye-tracking, physiological measures and spontaneous verbalisations.