NJ Scheers, PhD
NJ Scheers is a partner at BDS Data Analytics and has more than 25 years of experience as a statistician at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), a federal regulatory agency. As a Branch Chief in CPSC’s Directorate of Epidemiology, she improved the quality of risk analyses for injuries and deaths from children’s products, all-terrain vehicles, and lawnmowers. As Director of Budgeting, Strategic Planning and Evaluation, she led the development of the agency’s first risk-based outcome-oriented strategic plan, and wrote the agency’s budget justification for the Office of Management and Budget on issues regarding agency funding. She is a recognized expert on infant suffocation deaths; led a major nationwide study with onsite interviews of caregivers whose infants had recently died; and published the results of her risk analysis in prominent peer-reviewed journals. Her work contributed to major health policy changes in infant sleep guidelines by the American Academy of Pediatrics and she was a consultant to the AAP task force that developed the initial guidelines. Her most recent work contributed to a proposed ban on crib bumpers and interviews with the Washington Post and Consumer Reports. Concurrently, Dr. Scheers also served as a principal at Dayton & Scheers Consulting and partnered with KPMB to develop creative sampling plans to estimate overhead costs at major universities, as well as provide statistical advice/analysis on research topics for a variety of clients. Finally, Dr. Scheers was an adjunct faculty member at Loyola University, serving as a methodologist on Ph.D. dissertation committees, that resulted in a number of publications in peer-reviewed journals.