Dr. Cynthia Lum is University Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and director of George Mason University’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. She is a leading authority on evidence-based policing, an approach that advocates that research, evaluation, and scientific processes should have “a seat at the table” in law enforcement policymaking and practice. She has studied and written extensively about patrol operations and police crime prevention activities, police technology, investigations and detective work, and evidence-based crime policy. Additionally, she has developed numerous tools and strategies to translate and institutionalize research into everyday law enforcement operations. For her efforts, she received the 2020 Virginia State Council for Higher Education Outstanding Faculty Award.

Professor Lum is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. She is also an appointed member of the Committee on Law and Justice (CLAJ) for the National Academies of Sciences (NAS), and has also served on the NAS’s Committee on Proactive Policing as well as its Standing Committee on Traffic Law Enforcement. She is an appointed member of the Council on Criminal Justice's Policing Task Force, a Board Director for the National Police Foundation, a member of the Research Advisory Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and has served numerous elected and appointed positions within the American Society of Criminology. She is the founding editor of Translational Criminology Magazine and the Springer Series on Translational Criminology, and was the first North American Editor for the Oxford Journal Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. Dr. Lum is a Fulbright Specialist in policing and criminology and is the co-Director of the International Summer School for Policing Scholarship, developed with colleagues at the Scottish Institute for Policing Research and Arizona State University.

Her recent book with Christopher Koper, Evidence-Based Policing: Translating Research Into Practice (Oxford University Press), received the American Society of Criminology Division of Policing 2020 Outstanding Book Award. Professors Lum and Koper are the Editors-In-Chief of Criminology and Public Policy, the flagship policy journal of the American Society of Criminology.

Watch: "A Vision for American Policing Reform" GMU Vision Series Lecture by Cynthia Lum