ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Jonas Hansson
Umeå University, Conference Director & Program Co-director

Jonas Hansson holds a PhD in Public Health and is associate professor at the Police Education Unit at Umeå University in Sweden. Jonas was a sworn police officer (1993-2013), team leader, field training officer and instructor in self-defense, weapons and tactics. He completed a Master of Education at Umeå University with a focus on police students’ perceptions of their learning environment. Jonas is the Research and Science Correspondent for Sweden in CEPOL (European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training). He has been project leader of evaluation projects of field-tests with conducted energy weapon (CEW) in Sweden and Norway, and involved in a research project connected on the Police Authority's initiative with prioritized neighborhoods. Research interests are police officers and police work in relation to mental health, coping, stress, discretion, police tactics and conflict management.

Nick Crofts
GLEPHA, Program Co-director

Professor Nick Crofts is an epidemiologist and public health practitioner who has been working in the fields of HIV/AIDS, illicit drugs, harm reduction and law enforcement for 30 years. His major epidemiological work has been on the control of HIV and hepatitis C among injecting drug users in Australia and globally, including almost every country in Asia. As a designer and technical director of AusAID’s flagship HIV/AIDS program in Asia, ARHP 2002-2007, he was instrumental in building capacity among SE Asian police forces in relation to HIV, and has worked in many settings forging relationships between police and public health. He founded the Law Enforcement and HIV Network (LEAHN) in 2009, convenes the International Working Group on Policing Marginalised Communities, and is Director of the Law Enforcement and Public Health Conferences.

Nick Crofts was previously at the Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health for 19 years, where he was instrumental in building its Public and International Health arms, and was Deputy Director for five years. He was Director of Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre for three years, and then at the Nossal Institute for Global Health, developing its Law Enforcement and Public Health Program. His most recent appointment was as Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute in Turin. He has been a member of Australia’s National Council on AIDS three times, and has performed multiple consultancies for WHO, UNAIDS, UNODC, AusAID and other bilateral and multilateral agencies.

He edited the first Manual for Reduction of Drug Related Harm in Asia, founded the Asian Harm Reduction Network, and for his work in Asia was awarded the International Rolleston Award in 1998. He is author of over 150 articles, book chapters and editorials in refereed journals. As well as being technical director for AusAID’s regional HIV program, ARHP, he was technical director of AusAID’s Indonesian harm reduction program. He was principal investigator on an AusAID funded research project in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, on the influence of harm reduction on police.

Bill Stronach
Director, Centre for Law Enforcement and Public Health (CLEPH)

Bill Stronach spent 18 years as the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Drug Foundation which is one of Australia’s leading non-government organisations concerned with the prevention and reduction of drug related harms. Prior to this position, he was Director of Grassmere Youth Services located on the outskirts of Melbourne, working with juvenile offenders, homeless and sexually abused young people and their families. For twelve years before this he taught in secondary schools in the state of Victoria and the UK.

He was a Founding director and treasurer of Harm Reduction International (formerly the International Harm Reduction Association); a Director of the International Consortium on Alcohol and Harm Reduction and a member of the Victorian Child Death Review Committee. Hel has chaired the Boards of Anex (Association of Needle and Syringe Programs), Harm Reduction Victoria and the City of Melbourne’s Safe City Licensees Accord Monitoring Committee.

He was previously a member of the Victorian Premier’s Drug Prevention Council, the Victorian Alcohol and Drug Prevention Council, the Victorian Government’s Alcohol Strategy Planning Group and the Advisory Committee for the Centre for Harm Reduction at the Burnet Centre, Melbourne, Australia

Bill was Chairman of the Organising Committees for the 3rd (Melbourne), 7th (Hobart) and 15th (Melbourne) International Conferences on the Reduction of Drug Related Harm and LEPH2012 & LEPH2014. He brings extensive conference organising and management experience both within and beyond the public health sector.

He has been a consultant and advisor on many policy matters and projects in Australia and overseas and contributed chapters to a number of public health, drug prevention or harm reduction publications.

Mehdi Ghazinour
Umeå University

Mehdi Ghazinour has participated in teaching since the start of police training in 2000 within Umeå University, and in recent years conducted research in police work. Ghazinour's research focuses on perceived demand control and stress among police officers. The police's work environment issues with a focus on health and mental well-being form the core of his research. From a couple of years ago, he conducted active research in so-called vulnerable areas with other researchers where he has focused on the health, personality and resilience of the police in working in these areas. Between 2013-2019, Ghazinour act as vice head of the police education and responsible to building up the research environment in police work at Umeå University. In recent years, he has acted as a visiting professor and director at the Center for Police Research at Linnaeus University 2019-2021. He has worked as a supervisor and still supervises doctoral students in police work where most of the projects are based on a very practical and evidence-based foundation.

Johanna Sundqvist
Umeå University

Johanna Sundqvist holds a PhD in Public Health and is an associate professor at Police Education Unit at Umeå University in Sweden. She is also the Deputy Director at the Police Education Unit and responsibility for research development. Johanna has a BA in Social Work and supplementary education in family therapy. She was previously a trained social worker (2002-2013) with focus on family therapy and adolescents’ therapy in one municipality. Her research involves crime prevention and trust-building work, and the tools needed in order to create a safe and secure society. One such tool of particular interest to her research is collaboration and how collaboration between different social actors in society can be used in crime prevention work. She is also interested in mental health research concerning police work, for example how collaboration between different social actors affects the mental health of the individual person. She has been involved in research about collaboration in the fields of unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors, in case studies in so-called vulnerable areas in Sweden, and in research in the field of violent extremism.