A Promise Kept
Written by: Mark Desire, Assistant Director of Forensic Biology, City of New York Office of Chief Medical Examiner Twenty-five years have passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, yet the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) continues to make identifications and has never turned away from the families of the […]
Student Ambassador Poster Preview: Elizabeth Kowalcyzk on Low-Pass Whole-Genome Sequencing as a Cost-Effective Forensic Workflow
Elizabeth Kowalczyk expected that cutting the sequencing depth would cost her the data. It didn’t. Even at DNA inputs as low as 0.1 nanograms, her low-pass sequencing runs produced genotype accuracies above 99.8%. Her research asks whether whole-genome sequencing, usually run at a depth and price that puts it out of reach for many forensic […]
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! Placer County Sheriff’s Department Leverages Othram’s Identity Inference Platform to Identify a 1994 John […]
Student Ambassador Poster Preview: Xiaomeng (Simone) Yang on Predicting Body Weight and Muscularity with MicroRNAs
Simone Yang’s data told her saliva samples were the weaker ones: lower sequencing quality, fewer usable reads than blood. Then the validation results came back, and saliva held the strongest, most consistent markers in the entire study. She’s investigating whether microRNAs, small molecules that shift with a person’s metabolism and physical activity, can predict body […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Ronaldo Carneiro da Silva Junior
196 member countries. One shared DNA infrastructure. Most working analysts have never touched it. INTERPOL runs two separate systems. One does what a national database already does: compares one profile to another. The other, I-Familia, runs kinship algorithms to compare a sample against relatives, built specifically for the unidentified remains and missing persons cases a […]
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! Lydia de Castro ’91, ’10: Using Forensic Science to Identify 9/11 Victims (John Jay […]
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 […]