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! New Jersey State Police and FBI Leverage Othram’s Identity Inference Platform to Identify the […]
Student Ambassador Poster Preview: Mia Gale on Getting Usable DNA from Rootless Hair Shafts
Mia Gale was taught that hair shafts don’t contain nuclear DNA worth pursuing. Her research produced full STR profiles from them anyway. Rootless hairs are common at crime scenes, but the nuclear DNA in a hair shaft is scarce, highly degraded, and mostly lost by standard extraction kits built for larger fragments. Her research optimized […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Tim Kalafut
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” It’s commonly credited to Carl Sagan, though nobody’s entirely sure that’s right, and forensic DNA testimony has mostly treated it as an unstated rule: no DNA means no information, move on to the next finding. Kalafut’s talk argues the opposite. If someone is alleged to have carried […]
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 Scientist Reflects on Work to Identify 9/11 Victims, 25 Years Later (KXAN – […]
Student Ambassador Poster Preview: Daniel Arend on DNA Transfer in Domestic Violence Cases
Daniel Arend’s biting samples told a clear story: even 16 hours after contact, and after volunteers had gone back to their normal day, DNA from the person of interest was recoverable at near-complete profile quality in most samples. His strangulation samples told a very different one. Skin-to-skin contact produced only partial profiles, often too low […]
The Technical Leader Role: What It Takes, and How to Support It
Julie Sikorsky didn’t know the technical leader role existed until the day she was hired into a laboratory that had one waiting for her. She’s led a forensic biology unit for years since. She still remembers not knowing. That gap between what the role is and what most people understand about it before they’re in […]
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! Siena University and DNA Finders Present 3rd Annual Cold Case Day: Friday, September 25, […]
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 […]