Alfred Blumstein (born 1930) is an American scientist and the J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research at the Heinz College and Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
Blumstein graduated with his bachelor's degree and Ph.D. from Cornell University and worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses before joining the Heinz College.
Blumstein directs the NSF-funded National Consortium on Violence Research at Carnegie Mellon and was dean of the Heinz College from 1986 to 1993 He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Society of Criminology and served as President of the latter.
In 1996, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.
Blumstein's research centers around modeling criminal careers, deterrence, prison population, transportation analysis, drug-enforcement policy, and he developed "lambda" in criminology as a measurement of an individual's offending frequency.