Dr. Reid Meloy

As a board-certified forensic psychologist (ABPP), Dr. Meloy consults on criminal and civil cases throughout the U.S. and Europe. He is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, and a faculty member of the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and is past president of the American Academy of Forensic Psychology. He has received a number of awards and honors, including the first National Achievement Award in 1998 from the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, and the Manfred Guttmacher Award from the American Psychiatric Association in 2021. He was the Yochelson Visiting Scholar at Yale University in March 2015, and Visiting Scholar at the Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich — originally the Burgholzli Clinic — in May 2018.

Dr. Meloy has authored or co-authored over two hundred fifty papers published in peer-reviewed psychiatric and psychological journals and has authored, co-authored or edited thirteen books. He has been consulting, researching, and writing about personality disorder, psychopathy, stalking, narcissism, criminality, mental disorder, and targeted violence for the past thirty years. His first book, The Psychopathic Mind (Aronson, 1988), was an integration of the biological and psychodynamic understanding of psychopathy. His co-edited book with Drs. Hoffmann and Sheridan, Stalking, Threatening and Attacking Public Figures (Oxford University Press, 2008), led to a commissioned study for the National Academy of Sciences on threats toward public figures published in 2011 ( www.nap.edu ). The first edition of the International Handbook of Threat Assessment was published in 2014, and the second edition in 2021 (Oxford University Press).

Along with Dr. Stephen White, he created the WAVR-21, a structured professional judgment instrument for targeted workplace and campus violence. Dr. Meloy has been a consultant on criminal, counterintelligence, and counterterrorism cases for the Behavioral Analysis Units, FBI, Quantico, for the past twenty years. His counterterrorism work began when he was retained as the consulting forensic psychologist by the U.S. Attorney General in the prosecution of the defendants McVeigh and Nichols in the Oklahoma City bombing cases. He is the originator and developer of the TRAP-18 (Terrorist Radicalization Assessment Protocol, mhs.com), a validated risk assessment instrument used by counterterrorism professionals in North America and Europe.

He was a member of the Fixated Research Group for the United Kingdom’s Home Office concerning threats to the Royal Family and British political figures and is a consulting member of Work Trauma Services, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, and Team Psychology and Security in Darmstadt, Germany. He was also a founding associate editor of the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. Dr. Meloy is often quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR. He was a technical consultant to the television series CSI from its inception in 2000 until its final episode in 2015.