Jack Ballantyne is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and the Director of the National Center for Forensic Science in Orlando, Florida. He possesses a B.Sc. (with Honors) in Biochemistry from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, a M.Sc. in Forensic Science from the University of Strathclyde, Scotland and a PhD in Genetics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, NY. His current duties include teaching and conducting research in forensic molecular genetics.
Prior to entering academia, he was a casework forensic scientist in Scotland, Hong Kong and New York where he proffered expert testimony in the criminal courts of these jurisdictions. He was the full time DNA technical leader in the Suffolk County Crime Laboratory, New York and then served as a part-time consultant DNA technical leader for the States of Mississippi and Delaware, the City of Dallas and Sedgwick County, Kansas. He served as the the Chair of the New York State DNA Sub-committee, is a regular invited guest (IG) at the FBI’s Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (SWGDAM)
His research interests can be classified as “getting blood from a stone: more and more probative information from less and less genetic material”. Specifically, his current projects include RNA profiling for body fluid/tissue identification, associating a cellular phenotype to a DNA donor, and single-cell genetic analysis for DNA mixture deconvolution.
