Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2016, $1,135,873)
The New Jersey State Police (NJSP), Office of Forensic Sciences (OFS) maintains 5 forensic laboratories, which service over eight million people living in New Jersey. The system is comprised of 4 facilities: the Hamilton Technology Complex which houses the Central Regional and DNA Laboratories, and the North, East and South Regional Laboratories. The Hamilton Technology Complex is a full service State laboratory and is responsible for analyzing evidential material associated with criminal investigations (including DNA analysis of the 13 core loci), and analysis of convicted offender and arrestee samples for entry into the State and National Combined DNA Index System. The four regional laboratories provide drug and toxicology analysis and three of the regionals (South, East, and Central) provide arson analysis services and are responsible for taking in potential forensic biology cases.
The overtime provided by the grant will give the OFS DNA Laboratory the additional time to perform DNA analysis on over 500 cases awaiting analysis and upload the resultant DNA profiles generated into CODIS. The grant overtime will also allow a validation team to complete validations on new equipment/software in a timely manner without having to stop current casework analysis.
Funding will also enable the OFS DNA Laboratory to hire an additional part-time laboratory employee to directly process forensic mtDNA samples.
Funding provided for training will enable 4 analysts to attend the Fall 2017 and 2018 Promega meetings, one analyst to attend the 2017and 2018 Bode East meetings, 2 people to the 2017 and 2018 CODIS Conferences and 2 people to the 2017 and 2018 Green Mountain DNA conference.
Funding provided for equipment will increase the capacity of the DNA laboratory.
Necessary software/computer upgrades will also be purchased with funding from the FY2016 grant. These upgrades will allow instrumentation and current software to work effectively.
The OFS DNA Laboratory will also use funding to purchase licenses for the STRmix program. This mixture interpretation program is necessary for providing useful data to our customers on the wide range of samples that are processed in this laboratory.
It is expected that funding from the 2016 CEBR grant will result in increased overall capacity and efficiency of DNA analysis and reduce the number of samples awaiting analysis in the Office of Forensic Sciences DNA Laboratory.
nca/ncf