Harish Swaminathan (2014 Fellow) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at Rutgers University. Harish recently worked as an intern at the National Institute of Standards and Technology on the development of population-related computational methods for the analysis of repetitive sequences in the human genome known as short tandem repeats (STRs). He is expanding on these computational methods for his dissertation research, applying his algorithm to the interpretation of complex forensic DNA samples. "One of the aims we stated in our NIJ award proposal was to develop a method to determine the number of contributors to a DNA sample by characterization of the heights in the [electropherogram] signal," says Harish, who recently published his algorithm, known as NOCIt, and his associated experimental results as first-author in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics.