An innovative collaboration between researchers from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre and the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales has won a prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant.
The two year project will use mathematical modelling to investigate the structure of illicit drug trafficking networks to determine areas of vulnerabillity and resilience in the networks.
Chief Investigator Dr David Bright, research fellow at NDARC’s Drug Policy Modelling Program said that the planned multi-level analytic approach will improve existing knowledge of criminal networks.
“By combining methodologies from the social sciences and mathematics to identify weaknesses and strengths in criminal networks, we hope to improve the capacity of law enforcement to detect and dismantle these networks,” said Dr Bright.
Other investigators on the project are Associate Professor Alison Ritter (DPMP), Dr Catherine Greenhill (School of Mathematics and Statistics, UNSW), and Professor Carlo Morselli, University of Montreal.
