Sherry Towers


Sherry Meleah Jean Towers is an American and Canadian statistician and data scientist working as a visiting scholar at Purdue University and an affiliate scholar with the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany following a seven year position as a faculty research associate at Arizona State University. Towers is perhaps best known for her study of the contagion effect of mass shootings. She is also the founder and owner of Towers Consulting LLC, a consulting company that uses applied statistics and computational modeling servicing industry, academia, and the public sectors.

Education

Towers earned a B.Sc in Physics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. She then earned a PhD in Physics at Carleton University in 2000. Her doctoral dissertation, A Study of decays of the tau lepton with charged kaons, was supervised by. In 2010, Towers earned an M.S. in Applied Statistics from Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN.

Career and research

Towers worked as a research scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, developing advanced machine learning techniques from 2000-2005. Following this position she started Towers Consulting LLC and worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Purdue University, modeling the spread of pandemic influenza. From 2012-2017 she served as a faculty research associate at the , at Arizona State University. She modeled the dynamics of social systems, including modeling the spread of panic in a population, developed predictive crime analytics, and studied attitudes toward gun control. She is best known for her work showing the contagious effects of mass shootings. She currently is a visiting scholar at Purdue University and an affiliate scholar at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies.

Selected publications