Tara joined the Griffith University, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice as a Senior Lecturer in July 2010. From 2012-2015 she was a Research Fellow and the position was funded by the Australian Research Council for her Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. She has now returned to her substantive role as a Senior Lecturer. Prior to joining Griffith, she was part of the QUT School of Justice (2005-2010). During her time at QUT, Tara was a member of the University Human Research Ethics Committee and also was the Faculty Research Ethics Advisor. Tara has previously worked as a Research Officer at the former Criminal Justice Commission 1997-2000 and has also held research and teaching positions at The University of Queensland.

Tara has a strong background in designing questionnaires and administering large scale survey design research. She has worked with the Mater University Study of Pregnancy (MUSP), a large scale longitudinal study, for over fifteen years. Her latest two-year project with this team was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery DP15 and aims to study antisocial behaviour across three generations. Her PhD research focused on persistence and desistence of antisocial behaviour across childhood and adolescence and used data from the Mater University Study of Pregnancy (MUSP): http://www.ansoc.uq.edu.au/research/musp Other recent research extends her PhD findings to examine and compare the outcomes of antisocial behaviour in early adulthood. Tara has also been working with colleagues to examine individual antisocial behaviour in the context of family and neighbourhood factors. This research was funded in 2008 by the Australian Criminology Research Council.

In 2007-08, Tara was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology. This led to her Her ongoing work with Prof David Farrington examines adult-onset offending in the Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development (CSDD). During her time in Cambridge, Tara was also a visiting scholar at Wolfson College. This work paved the foundation for her ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2012-2015) Offending across the life-course: Testing developmental and life-course theories of crime. During this time, Tara travelled to the University of Cambridge as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Criminology to continue her collaborations with David Farrington