Former Department Chair and Distinguished University Professor Lawrence W. Sherman was recently named the #1 most influential criminologist according to AcademicInfluence.com.

He is currently the Director of the Cambridge Police Executive Programme and Director of Research for the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology at the University of Cambridge. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, and as Honorary President of the Society of Evidence-Based Policing, which has 2,000 members in 35 countries, primarily serving police officers who are interested in research, and as Chief Executive of the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing. He is the past President of the American Society of Criminology, of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, of the International Society of Criminology, and past Chair of the Division of Experimental Criminology of ASC. Since 2006 he has served as Co-Chair of the International Jury for the annual Stockholm Prize in Criminology. 

Sherman has conducted extensive research into restorative justice, experimental criminology, and crime prevention. He has served as co-director of a program performing longitudinal experiments involving over 2000 offenders and crime victims, seeking to better understand restorative justice policies and approaches. He has formerly served as president of the International Society of Criminology, the Academy of Experimental Criminology, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Society of Criminology. He has received multiple honors in the field of criminology, including the American Sociological Society’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Crime, Law and Deviance, the Campbell Collaboration’s Robert Boruch Award, and the Academy of Experimental Criminology’s Joan McCord Award.

Sherman’s recent awards include Yale University’s Wilbur Cross Medal (2017), the Gold Medal of the University of Bialystok in Poland (2017), the ASC Division of Policing Lifetime Achievement Award (2016), honorary doctorates in social science from the University of Stockholm (2013) and humane letters from Denison University (2014), the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Royal Society of Arts in London in 2011, the Beccaria Medal in Gold of the German Society of Criminology in 2009, and a Distinguished Achievement Award from George Mason University in 2013. In 2014 the Division of Experimental Criminology of ASC selected his JEC article on the death rates of domestic abuse victims in the Milwaukee arrest experiment (co-authored with then-UMD PhD student Heather Harris) for the Outstanding Field Experiment of the year.