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 […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Stacey Baker
In 2022, pieces of tissue started washing ashore along the Atlantic coast between Palm Beach and Broward Counties. STR and Y-STR testing confirmed the remains were human, and male. There were no bones to estimate age or ancestry. There was no missing persons report to check against. Two labs ran the DNA independently and got […]
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! ‘A Miracle’: Teen Murdered Nearly 26 Years Ago Identified Through Genetic Genealogy (CNN – […]
When the SOP Isn’t Enough: How Elyssa Trautmann Solves Cold Cases at FDLE
Cold case DNA work doesn’t fail because analysts aren’t skilled. It stalls because evidence is old, degraded, or formatted in ways the standard operating procedure was never written to address. Sexual assault smears from 1983. Evidence packaged before current collection protocols existed. Items that don’t fit the workflow because the workflow was built for something […]
Building STRmix™ from the Ground Up: A Q&A with ISHI Student Ambassador Kiersten Fultz and Dr. Jo Bright
Building software for probabilistic genotyping is technically demanding. Building it so it holds up in court systems across multiple countries is something different. That distinction drove much of how STRmix™ was designed. Dr. Jo Bright is a Senior Science Leader at the New Zealand Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science, formerly known as ESR. […]
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! DNA Evidence Connects Minneapolis Driver to Two Sexual Assaults a Decade Apart, Charges Say […]