On September 20, 2024, NIJ announced $1.1 million in funding to support three new projects under its Research and Evaluation for the Testing and Interpretation of Physical Evidence in Publicly Funded Forensic Laboratories (Public Labs R&E) program. Through its forensic science research funding, NIJ continues to improve the examination and interpretation of physical evidence across the community of practice through identification of the most efficient, accurate, reliable, and cost-effective methods of analysis.
Funding Highlights for 2024
Since 2015, NIJ has invested over $13 million in 46 projects under its Public Labs R&E program. The program was developed specifically to enable research at public forensic laboratories to identify efficient, accurate, reliable, and cost-effective methods of analysis. The goal is to use evaluation and improvement of existing laboratory protocols or comparison of an existing protocol to an emerging method to develop techniques or protocols that can be shared with the forensic community and benefit or aid decision making by lab directors and other forensic administrators.
The following are this year’s new projects:
Validating the ASB 122 Best Practice Recommendation for Performing Alcohol Calculations in Forensic Toxicology, Virginia Commonwealth University ($676,376)
The standard Widmark equation has been used for more than 80 years to determine the concentration of ethanol at a given time. The limitations of the equation have been well described and create disparate opinions. “ASB 122: Best Practice Recommendation for performing Alcohol Calculations in Forensic Toxicology” was developed to improve the quality and consistency of performing ethanol calculations. The two normative references were used to develop an improved calculation to conduct retrograde calculations for ethanol. However, the new calculation is founded on populations that lack diversity that adequately reflect all ages, races, and modern bodies. This study aims to address the knowledge gap by validating the ASB 122 calculations using a diverse population. The validation design includes two controlled ethanol dosing regimens that reflect more real-world drinking habits, and the study will include diverse volunteers considering weight, height, body mass index, age, race, and gender.
Development of double cases for the validation of three-dimensional imaging systems for firearms forensics, University of Central Oklahoma ($205,090)
3D imaging systems for firearms forensics have been developed and promise increased comparison accuracy and efficiency. However, before the purchasing laboratory can use these systems in casework, they must perform a deployment validation. This typically calls for the laboratory to generate their own diverse set of test-fired cartridge cases and bullets, which costs time and money to produce. The proposed study aims to create a master validation set of cartridge cases and bullets and then replicate these physical samples using the double casting process. These replicas can then be distributed to any interested laboratory. The master set can be replicated any number of times, reducing the amount of time examiners spend generating their own validation test sets, removed from casework.
The potential of hybridization capture to permit species identification in challenging leathers, North Carolina State University ($232,857)
Leather items, such as boots and wallets, are often made legally from mammal or reptile skins, but can also be made illegally from endangered species, such as sea turtles or Chinese alligators. In forensic wildlife casework, when morphological species identifications cannot be made, wildlife forensic scientists often rely on genetic analysis to determine whether the item was made from a protected species. However, the series of chemicals used on animal skins in the leather-making process degrade DNA, making it highly fragmented and yielding low success using standard polymerase chain reaction-based genetic methods. One potential solution to glean informative genetic information from severely compromised biological samples is to use new, highly sensitive molecular methods, such as hybridization capture coupled with next-generation sequencing. This study aims to create a custom hybridization panel from full mitochondrial genomes to encompass approximately 50 species typically found in leather to aid in species identification in forensic wildlife casework.
These projects support the goals of NIJ’s recently published Forensic Science Strategic Research Plan, 2022-2026.