Dr Emma Belton is an Early Career Researcher, with a strong track record of research in radicalisation and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) demonstrated by a number of academic achievements and collaborations with industry partners. She acted as lead project manager on an ARC funded project responsible for the development of the Profiles of Individual Radicalisation in Australia (PIRA) dataset, which collects data on terrorist offenders and individuals who have radicalised to extremism. She has received training in the use and application of the Violent Extremist Risk Assessment (VERA-2R) tool by the Dept of Home Affairs and undertaken a validation study of the VERA-2R instrument. She has also worked with various government and law enforcement agencies to conduct evaluations of custody and community-based CVE programs that target convicted terrorists and vulnerable populations at risk of radicalisation. She holds a PhD in Criminology from the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on characteristics of individual radicalisation and violent extremism in Australia and aims to improve understanding of risk factors associated with violent compared to non-violent extremists.
Dr Hai Thanh Luong is currently conducting his Research Fellow in Cyber Criminology at the School of Social Science and a member of HDR Committee as well as collaborating with UQ Cyber Centre. Additionally, he is a member of the Global Initiative Network's Expert against Transnational Organized Crime (GI TOC) and also a senior researcher and chair of the Asian Drug Crime Research Committee at the Institute for Asian Crime and Security (IACS), the U.S while holding an Associate Research Fellow at the Social and Global Studies Centre, RMIT University. Dr Hai has a Bachelor of Law (Criminal Investigation) and has spent twenty years researching and teaching in police institutions across the mainland Southeast Asian region, particularly in Vietnam. In 2010, as one of the new emergent scholars for the Australian Development Scholarship in non-traditional security threat fields, he was awarded a full scholarship to gain a Master in Transnational Crime Prevention at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. In 2017 he earned a PhD (criminology) at the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, after examining the complicated structure and modus operandi of several transnational drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle across the borderland between Vietnam and Laos in his thesis. His interests include cybercrime, policing in cybercrime/cybersecurity, drug trafficking, migrant smuggling, human trafficking, police training, environmental crimes and biological threats. As a research fellow in cyber criminology at the UQ, he prioritises exploring what, why, and how the human factors impact trends and patterns of cybercrime and applying criminological theories to analyse the criminal network structure and crime script of cyber-related crimes. His latest book 'Transnational Drug Trafficking across the Vietnam and Laos Border' was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. He has also published several papers in various academic journals (Asian Survey; Journal of Crime and Justice; International Journal of Cyber Criminology; International Journal of Drug Policy; Policing and Society; International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy; and Trends in Organized Crime, among others). In 2020, he was awarded the Young Asian Criminologists from the Asian Criminological Society (ASC).
As a member of the Asian Regional Law Enforcement Management Program (ARLEMP), funded by the Australian Federal Police and hosted by the Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam and RMIT Hanoi, he contributed to building a comprehensive connection among law enforcement agencies, policymakers, and academia across Asian countries to prevent and combat serious and transnational crimes since 2005. Accordingly, he has collaborated with law enforcement agencies (police, customs, border guards, coast/maritime guards, and rangers) to exchange, discuss, and research the trends and patterns of transnational crimes across the Southeast Asia region through joining and consulting at the Australia-Mekong Partnership and the U.S.-Mekong Dialogue against Transnational Crimes. Recently, he presented and worked closely with many international and regional organisations, including the UNODC Regional Office for Southeast Asia and the Pacific (Bangkok, Thailand), ASEANPOL, and AFP and consulted with the Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam and the Ministry of Justice of Vietnam. He has gained research funds from the GI TOC, UNODC, Harm Reduction International, International Drug Policy Consortium, Australian Government, the U.S. Department of State, and Vietnamese Government in recent ten years.
