Gloria Laycock graduated in psychology from University College London in 1968 and completed her PhD at UCL in 1975. She worked in the Home Office for over thirty years of which almost twenty years were spent on research and development in the policing and crime prevention fields. She established and headed the Home Office Police Research Group in 1992. She has extensive research experience in the UK and has acted as a consultant on policing and crime prevention in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, South Africa and Europe. She is currently an advisor to HEUNI, a UN affiliated crime prevention organisation based in Helsinki.

In 1999 she was awarded an International Visiting Fellowship by the United States Department of Justice based in Washington DC. She returned to the UK in April 2001 from a four-month consultancy at the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra to become Director of the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science. In 2006 she was additionally appointed to direct the new UCL Centre for Security and Crime Science and was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2008 for services to crime policy.

She is now also directing the new £7m EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Security Science at UCL.