Dr. Lorna Ferguson is an award-winning criminologist specializing in policing and missing persons in Canada. As the Founder of the North America-wide Missing Persons Research Hub, she has made significant contributions to understanding how police respond to missing persons cases, particularly those that involve complex challenges like criminal connections, vulnerable populations, and cold/long-term cases. Her work as a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at Memorial University consists of the study of police search and rescue operations, which plays a critical role in safely recovering missing individuals in various challenging environments, including those with mental health crises or vulnerable youth. Dr. Ferguson’s involvement in high-profile projects, such as the Toronto Police Service's failures of the Bruce McArthur investigations and the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains return home interviews, exemplifies her dedication to addressing systemic issues in policing and safeguarding communities. She has educated, trained, and partnered with over forty police services and several individual officers to enhance police practices and policies and officer knowledge on missing persons. With her research, service, and the Missing Persons Research Hub, Dr. Ferguson’s ultimate goals are advancing scholarship in this field, improving police response to missing persons, and preventing and reducing missing persons in Canada.

While her specialization is police responses to missing persons, Dr. Ferguson conducts research in various areas related to policing, including incident command, evidence-based policing, technologies, calls involving persons with mental illness, cybercrime, police data, and police reform. Dr. Ferguson’s scholarly work has been published in top peer-reviewed journals in the field and has been the subject of many local, national, and international presentations. Her recent research has appeared in Criminology & Criminal Justice, Crime & Delinquency, Policing & Society, and Policing: An International Journal, among others. She has written four books, e.g., The Wicked Problems of Police Reform in Canada with Routledge and Police Search and Rescue Response to Lost and Missing Persons with Springer Nature. Dr. Ferguson has taught university courses at the intersection of sociology, law, and criminology.