When CODIS Isn’t Enough: How One Lab Is Closing the Gaps in Border Identification
Texas law designates a single institution as the primary repository for unidentified human remains recovered along the Mexico-Texas border: the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas in Fort Worth. Every set of remains recovered by state and local law enforcement agencies along that corridor comes to CHI. Getting them identified is […]
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! Forensic Science Expert John M. Collins Announces Pre-Orders for New Book (Norfolk Daily News […]
The Problems They’re Actually Working On: A Conversation with the ISHI Advisory Committee
Not hypothetical challenges. Not field-wide abstractions. The actual, specific problems that four members of the ISHI Advisory Committee are working on right now — in their labs, with their teams, and in their research. https://youtu.be/SoypcvHwicg Shena Latcham is working on the backlog. Missouri passed a statute requiring all sexual assault kits to be collected and […]
What If You Could Screen for Mixtures Before the STR Profile? A Q&A with ISHI Student Ambassador Kiersten Fultz
Forensic DNA workflows are built around the STR profile. It’s also where analysts first learn a sample has a problem — a mixture they didn’t anticipate, a template too low to produce usable results. By then, the options for adjusting the approach have narrowed considerably. Kiersten Fultz, a master’s student in Forensic Science at Virginia […]
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! After Nearly 70 Years, Genealogy Solves Martin Family Disappearance (Forensic – 4/20/2026) On Sunday, […]
Before the First Case: Introducing ISHI On-Demand’s FIGG Module
Most forensic labs first encounter FIGG as an investigative possibility—a technology that solved a high-profile cold case, a grant that suddenly makes it fundable, an investigator asking whether a decades-old profile could yield a lead. The question comes before the framework. That sequencing matters. Forensic investigative genetic genealogy isn’t an extension of existing DNA workflows. […]
What Teeth Can Tell Us About Age: A Q&A with ISHI Student Ambassador Maria Josefina Castagnola
In forensic anthropology, age estimation from adult skeletal remains is one of the field’s harder problems. Classical methods lose accuracy as people get older, and biological fluids — the tissue base for most methylation-based age estimation research — aren’t always what a scene gives you. Maria Josefina Castagnola, a PhD student at New Jersey Institute […]
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! Suspect Arrested in 1990 Cold Case Homicide of 27-Year-Old Woman (Forensic – 4/13/2026) Sussex […]
When One Identification Changes Everything: The Robert Eugene Brashers Case
The Wednesday keynote at ISHI 37 examines the Robert Eugene Brashers case — a multi-decade, multi-jurisdictional investigation resolved through the intersection of STR analysis, forensic genetic genealogy, and interagency collaboration — and the perspectives that emerge when a single identification reaches across decades of connected harm. The moment a DNA profile links one case to […]