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 […]
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 […]