David V. Canter

Who is David V. Canter?

David Victor Canter is a psychologist. He began his career as an architectural psychologist studying the interactions between people and buildings, publishing and providing consultancy on the designs of offices, schools, prisons, housing and other building forms as well as exploring how people made sense of the large scale environment, notably cities. He set up the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 1980. His work in architecture led to studies of human reactions in fires and other emergencies. He pioneered investigative psychology in Britain. He helped police in 1985 on the Railway Rapist case. He was the Professor of Psychology at the University of Surrey for ten years, where he developed investigative psychology described in detail in Investigative Psychology: Offender Profiling and the Analysis of Criminal Action and a course curriculum. He set up and was Director of the Centre For Investigative Psychology which is based at the University of Liverpool. Since 2009 he has been at the University of Huddersfield where he is the Director of the International Research Centre in Investigative Psychology.