Sherry Towers is an American and Canadian statistician and data scientist working as an independent consultant and an affiliate scholar with the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in

Potsdam, Germany Potsdam () is the capital and, with around 183,000 inhabitants, largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of B ...

following a seven year position as a faculty research associate at

Arizona State University Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the ...

. 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 provides visual analytics, data mining, applied statistics, and computational modeling services to 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 The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by c ...

at Stony Brook, developing advanced machine learning techniques from 2000-2005. Following this position she started Towers Consulting LLC (2007) and worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Purdue University, modeling the spread of pandemic

influenza Influenza, commonly known as "the flu", is an infectious disease caused by influenza viruses. Symptoms range from mild to severe and often include fever, runny nose, sore throat, muscle pain, headache, coughing, and fatigue. These symptoms ...

. From 2012-2017 she served as a faculty research associate at th
Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center
at

. 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 an independent consultant and an affiliate scholar at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, and works on a variety of research topics, including election violence, the spread of political and partisan sentiments in a society, social media analytics, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Selected publications

* "Beyond Ebola: Lessons to mitigate future pandemics, 2015" * "Contagion in mass killings and school shootings, 2015" * "Estimate of the reproduction number of the 2015 Zika virus outbreak in Barranquilla, Colombia, and estimation of the relative role of sexual transmission, 2016" * "Quantifying the relative effects of environmental and direct transmission of norovirus, 2018"

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Towers, Sherry Living people Carleton University alumni Purdue University alumni Simon Fraser University alumni Arizona State University faculty Place of birth missing (living people) Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century Canadian mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 21st-century American women scientists 21st-century Canadian scientists Data scientists Women data scientists Canadian expatriate academics American expatriate academics American expatriates in Germany Canadian expatriates in Germany American women statisticians Canadian statisticians 21st-century Canadian women scientists