Student Ambassador Poster Preview: Irina Badell Garcia on Estimating Time Since Death with DNA Methylation
Irina Badell Garcia knew her way around CODIS STRs and mitochondrial kinship testing before her PhD even started. Then her advisor, Dr. Aaron Shafer, asked her to learn something she’d never touched: DNA methylation, at a taphonomic research facility that doesn’t have a counterpart anywhere else in Canada. Her research asks whether the chemical marks […]
What They’re Looking Forward to at ISHI 37: A Conversation with the ISHI Advisory Committee
The people who help shape ISHI’s agenda have a front-row view of where forensic science is heading. So, what are they actually looking forward to? https://youtu.be/RQDgMbFY0Wk Three of the four ISHI Advisory Committee members are watching artificial intelligence — but for very different reasons. Shena Latcham is thinking about cold cases — specifically, the friction […]
It Takes a Village: The August 2026 ISHI Report is Now Available
August tends to arrive in forensic science labs with a kind of dual energy, one foot still in summer’s casework, the other already leaning toward Providence. ISHI 37 is just a few months out, and the August issue of The ISHI Report arrives in that window, a preview of some of the stories and conversations […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Mark Perlin
A state crime lab ran DNA from a gun and got an inconclusive result: multiple contributors, no clean match. Probabilistic genotyping software reran the same evidence and returned a likelihood ratio of 11.5 trillion to one. That gap, an inconclusive read against a number that precise, is exactly what got challenged on appeal. The Third […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Scientific and Legal Lessons from the Gilgo Beach Frye Hearing
In September 2025, a New York court admitted DNA evidence built from SNP analysis, whole genome sequencing, and rootless hair samples in a criminal trial for the first time in the state’s history. Getting there took a Frye hearing with nine separate hearing days spread across the spring and summer of 2025. The case itself […]
This Week in Forensic Science
No one has hours to scour the papers to keep up with the latest news, so we’ve curated the top news stories in the field of Forensic Science for this week. Here’s what you need to know to get out the door! Jackson County Medical Examiner’s Office & Kansas City Police Crime Laboratory Teams with Othram […]
Dear Mentor: How Should Labs Partner with Universities to Build the Next Generation?
A member of the Forensic Leadership Alliance sent in a question many labs are quietly living with: how can labs strengthen mentorship and collaboration between agencies, students, and providers to better prepare the next generation? It’s easy to file that question under someday. Every lab already has more casework than hours, and a mentorship program […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Jo Bright
Autosomal STR interpretation moved to probabilistic genotyping years ago. It’s now the standard in most U.S. labs. Y-STR interpretation didn’t make the same jump. Most labs still rely on database comparison and manual counting, even in the sexual assault cases where Y-STR is often the only way to pull a male profile out of a […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Kevin Lord
A SNP profile can upload cleanly to GEDmatch, clear every filter, and still be wrong. False-negative segments can knock a real relative off the match list entirely. False-positive segments can send an investigator chasing someone with no biological connection to the sample at all. Astrea Forensics has reanalyzed sequencing data originally generated by other labs […]