Rate My Professor Natalie Thomas

Natalie Thomas is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of New England (UNE), where she specializes in rural criminology and drug policy. Affiliated with the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, she served as Co-director of the Centre for Rural Criminology and co-leads the thematic research area on drug use, production, and trafficking in rural contexts. Her research focuses on the intersections of health and justice, including alcohol and other drug regulation and policy, criminal justice policy and programs, representations of women in drug policy, prisoner re-entry challenges in rural Australia, opioid-related harms in rural areas, and the application of qualitative and mixed-methods research to program evaluation. Thomas holds a Bachelor of Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Queensland, a Bachelor of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Honours) from Griffith University, and a PhD in Criminology from Griffith University. During her appointment at UNE from 2017 to 2020, she engaged in outreach activities, such as leading criminology information sessions for Indigenous high school students through the Oorala Aboriginal Centre.

Key publications from her time at UNE include 'Representations of women and drug use in policy: A critical policy analysis' (International Journal of Drug Policy, 2018), 'The movement and translation of drug policy ideas' (Contemporary Drug Problems, 2019), and 'The impact of rurality on opioid-related harms: A systematic review of qualitative research' (International Journal of Drug Policy, 2020). She co-authored public commentary such as 'As drug deaths rise in rural Australia, we must do more to prevent overdoses' (The Conversation, 2019) and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Rural Crime. Following her role at UNE, Thomas advanced to Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research, University of Queensland, while remaining a research associate at UNE's Centre for Rural Criminology. Her work has supported government program evaluations, including those for naloxone distribution, sentencing pilots, and domestic violence specialist health workforces.