Lawrence W. Sherman

By Sara L. Austin, EdD

Lawrence W. Sherman was born in 1949 in Schenectady, New York. He graduated from Denison University with a B.A. in political science, before earning his M.A. in social science from the University of Chicago. He went on to earn his diploma in criminology from the University of Cambridge and his M.A. and Ph.D in sociology from Yale University.

Sherman has conducted extensive research into restorative justice, experimental criminology, and crime prevention. His work has been pivotal in stimulating a professional social movement among police officers across the world and in demonstrating how social science can be instrumental at the core of badly needed police reforms. 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.

He is the founding co-chair of criminology’s highest honor, the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. Sherman was Former Department Chair and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. 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.

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