Advancing Justice for the Missing and Unidentified Through Research - 2024 NIJ Research Conference

Please welcome to the stage, Director Nancy.

A new walk on song, a new day. Welcome everyone, of day two of the NIJ national research conference. It's so great to have all of you here. I don't know how you experienced yesterday but for me, I was engaged! The quality of the content of these panels is exceptional, right? I know it's me saying this so maybe I'm wrong and maybe you can tell me afterwards, if I'm wrong or just look at me cross wise. There's not a lot of conferences that lift up this type of conversation around research and its implications for policy and practice. Really dive deep and give ample time for questions so I really, thoroughly enjoyed myself and I hope you did too. I hope you enjoyed your evening in it Pittsburgh and today, we have another full line up. There's two things I want to remind you about. The first is our poster session late this afternoon. We will make sure we get you out in time for dinner or even happy hour beforehand. It doesn't run too late and it's so important. It's one of the ways we crafted to enable people who were not necessarily grantees to come and showcase their research and we have 58% of our poster presents are students and we really need to support our students because they're the future of this profession. Please, please, explore the posters and interact with the poster presenters. I'm sure you will learn a lot.

My other reminder, you can probably guess. Does anyone want to offer up the guess?What? Evaluations? Yes!That's exactly right. How did you know?Please, please, please give us the feedback that we need to make the next conference even better than this one is. The so thank you for that. I also want to encourage you, like I said yesterday, to really explore different topics. I want to summon the forensic area that we're just fascinating. I learned so much and I made some connections in my mind to social science issues and policy issues that, you know, I just love connecting the dots and thinking about how, what I learned over here can apply there as well. That's a lot of what we do at NIJ.

A lot of people know NIJ just through the lens of their particular topical area of interest or expertise. Of course we have our policing folks and the lead scholars we featured yesterday so they know NIJ through the policing research we do, right? Others of you know NIJ through the physical sciences areas and our body armor program which is very prominent if you're not aware of it. NIJ develops standards for all of the body armor that law enforcement wears and if it meets the standards, it has the NIJ seal of approval on it. There's a whole other area of investment, research investment that NIJ engages in and that's in the forensic space. And even within forensics, it covers drug toxicology, ballistics and of course, forensic science. Our forensic science work is particularly around anthropology and forensic DNA is robust. When you think of the mission to trying to make a difference, safety and justice and even the theme of this conference which is, advancing justice through science, I can think of no better example than this next panel.

You're in for a treat. This is a fantastic group of experts who will share more. I'm going to introduce the facilitator and that is Lucas Zarwell and he is the director of NIJ's office of investigative and forensic science. He has a fantastic team. They are so knowledgeable and dedicated and any way, I can't speak enough about NIJ's forensic research portfolio. We also support forensic technology center of excellence which is a resource for the field. They have a strategic plan that they developed and was just going to print as I started as NIJ director a couple of years ago and that plan is so smart, so strategic and they're chipping away at it with full support from me.

I really do love our forensic research and I think you know why after you will hear from this panel so with no further ado, I am going to watch a video while our panelist come on stage. Thank you!

(Video playing).

Thank you! I appreciate everyone joining us this morning. I would like to just give a shout out, just in case you didn't know, this is national forensic science week so let's hear for that real quick. So let me kind of frame this a little bit. The missing and unidentified persons problem in the United States and even internationally is extremely complex. We have a very large country with rural and urban jurisdictions and each one of them has unique challenges when solving cases of unidentified human remains. So when we think about today's world and how connected we are all, you know, it's interesting that people can still go missing and that we can find descendants and they don't have a background. So I think this particular panel, the individuals we collected here today is really about getting justice for victims and making sure we have dignified and legal outcomes for the deceased which in this country, we don't think about that often. It's a little bit in the background. And I do believe that this panel understands the importance and the magnitude of solving these cases. So with that heavy conversation, each of you have very unique perspectives on this problem. I just wanted to start with Dawnie. If you can please introduce yourself and tell the audience a little bit about who you are.

Dawnie: Good morning! I'm Dawnie, professor of anthropology at the department ‑‑ down ‑‑ this is my dog. If you see him, you can say hi. I'm at the Department of an anthropology at the University of Tennessee. I am the director of the forensic anthropology center at the University of Tennessee and I'm a skeleton biologist and forensic anthropologist.

Hi, good morning. I'm Erin McBride, the lab director at a private forensic DNA laboratory in Virginia called BODIE technology and they is been testing human remains for the past 25 years so we have been involved in large scale, missing persons projects worldwide as well as one of the DNA labs name us program so we bring the DNA perspective to this problem.

So my name is Brandon Elkins and I'm a special agent with the Tennessee bureau of investigation and I over see TBI's cold case and human remains initiative. I am also from Tennessee so if you can't understand me today, make sure to knock on your neighbor that is from the south and see if they can translate.

My name is Heather McKierman and I serve as the senior manager of forensics RTI international and I serve as the forensic service project manager where I coordinate all of our forensic offerings including traditional DNA and forensic investigative Genealogy which is what my background is in.

Thank you guys! Erin, I'm going to start with you. BODI received an NIJ award in 2023. You may have to explain it to our audience a little bit but it had to do with the evaluation of snip targeted enrichment. So I'm wondering, can you talk about if you're able to show that the enrichment is a viable technique, how does it change the landscape of human remains identification?

Yes, I can give some background on that. Well, assuming that we can develop a viable technique, what it will do is allow us to solve more cases, especially cases that are highly degraded, very challenged remains and just to frame it, bones are some of the most difficult ones to test for DNA and there's just inherent challenges to them, to the point that many labs don't even test bones and there's a lot of research, much of which is supported by NIJ over the years to improve testing methods and I think we have come a long way when it comes to traditional testing, STR, the type of testing going in the CODIS database. Most of the time, we can get a traditional DNA profile from bones but there's still challenges. There may not be hits in it the database or family references available and that is where forensic investigative, Genealogy is a Game Changer for solving these unsolved cases but now we're using techniques that are not new, but they're new to forensics and they have not been optimized for these difficult sample types.

If you think about a lot of the Genealogy testing, it's designed to work with saliva samples you donate and send in. It's not designed to work with 40 year old, cold case bones. Now we have to improve methods with sequencing to get it to the same point, like with these incremental improvements so specifically, with this grant, the target enrichment, what happens is sequencing now is the reaction sequences everything that you put in there so including non human DNA and this bacterial non human DNA often interferes with the sequencing and can impact the quality of the result we get and that in turn, decreases the quality of matching. With this grant, we aim to do target enrichment where we will capture just the human DNA and the reaction and to sequence that and that can allow us to get more matches and a higher success rate.

As far as changing the landscape, the other goal of this grant is to work on best practices in this area. To create a blueprint for other labs to implement this so it's more widely accessible as oppose to a specialized test so this can be more common place and help overcome the barriers to entry with this new technology for other labs by disseminating this research which be NIJ does a great job of doing in avenues such as this.

Thanks, Erin. That was a good explanation for a complex technique. I think we take for granted, how difficult it is to get to the substance in a way we can apply it. I'm excited about that work!

Dawnie, NIJ has seen a lot of advancements in medical investigation and in human identification. As an anthropologist, how has it effected?

For those who are not familiar with forensic anthropology, they study the human skeleton, all of the theology, growth and development and for all of that, we take all of the knowledge of the human skeleton and apply that information to be address forensic questions like where is somebody? How can we recover them? Who are they? What happened to them? So a trauma analysis and things like that.

In terms of the advancements that effects our field tremendously, because we deal with human remains in the worst of the worst condition. They can't be visually identified. They can't be fingerprinted and so it falls to us. So we work the cold cases and the cases that can't be solved with other means so the advancements coming down, especially with DNA, with the forensic Genealogy and this SNIP enhancement is very exciting and rapid DNA is very exciting. Not only for cold cases but mass fatality incidents and human rights work that anthropologists are integral to. I think other advances are the microbiome. Remote sensing techniques to help us find the missing people. New chemistry techniques such as LIV that can help us distinguish individuals from the skeletal remains which previously we have only been able to do with DNA. And isotopes in general are super interesting. We're helping with bio metrics push that technology so the algorithms can detect individuals and capture bio metrics and have a match even in individuals who had are not in the best of conditions. But I think the key to all of these potential resources though, is testing.

We have to, when we bring the technology into the forensic zone, we have to determine this and NIJ's basic science grants can help us figure it out. What are the boundaries to this technology? When does it work? When does it not work? We have to understand the associated errors with a particular technology and I think also, it's our responsibility to understand the ethical implications of the applications of technology including the responsible use of AI to forensic case work.

You had to go there. You had to open it up. I understand.

Yea I did!

Switching gears a little bit, and I will move over to Brandon. So Brandon, we understand your office uses NEMIS, the nation missing unidentified person, a system to coordinate missing and unidentified persons case work. Can you tell us how your office applies the tool? Has it been helpful? Are there other resources at OJP or NIJ that supported your investigations?

Absolutely! Yes. I love how they put me right next to Heather here so I have to talk great things about NAMIS. You know, it has been an integral part of TBI's investigative strategy involving long term missing cases as well as unidentified human remains cases as long as I have been there. This is sort of the gold standard for law enforcement and in handling these cases. Tennessee has adopted a law that now has helped us to be able to make sure that the information is inputted quickly and responsibly and you know, if you're unfamiliar with it and Heather can say more about it but it definitely allows us to plug into two ends.

So if someone has a missing person, they can input the information, the bio metric information, DNA and be when the remains are found, and it give us a route to go. A FLAIRS to start.

We have seen success and it is turned around quickly. It's fantastic! It's also a great resource for law enforcement in seeking forensic testing especially ‑‑

While we would love it to be true, there's only currently 16 states that have state based legislation that require entry into the system and that outside of that, we rely on the voluntary entry and law enforcement agencies as well as medical examiners and coroners. So the data in the database doesn't represent the entirety of the missing and unidentified persons problem within the United States. I think that kind of goes hand in hand with another miss conception that as a program of the national institute of justice, the intention of the name us, this is really to provide a practical tool for investigative agencies to work through and solve these very challenging cases and then I think the last thing, certainly not the last misconception I have heard but the last one I will point to here is, just maybe an understanding of some of the limitations of the program. And I think since inception, the volume of cases the program has supported has grown exponentially, almost 10 fold. We currently have almost 70,000 active missing and unidentified persons cases in the database that our team works to support. While we are very appreciative of the funding levels that we do receive, there's certain challenges with the staff of under a dozen that is working to help support that case volume.

Yes, that's interesting. I saw a statistic yesterday from NY ‑‑ Monday from NCIC that was showing 600,000 missing cases from NCIC but those are also short term missing cases, right in like, NamUs, for the long term cases?

Yes, it is the long term cases but some discretion of the investigator because it there's an indication that person is at an imminent risk of harm or a suicide note, you're walking into a bloody room where that person disappeared from, you know, indications like that, that show, you know, that person succumbed to some kind of an injury, that is a case that they should immediately enter into the database so there's a little bit of gray zone there and it really does come down to the investigating agencies and kind of their discretion on when they think that case could best be served by the resources that the program affords.

Thanks, Heather. So Erin, we know that BODI has gotten a number of research awards from NIJ and other places but how else does it serve the community?

Sure, yes. So our primary business is a DNA service provider so while we have a robust research frame, our primary business is in testing cases and so we test over 20,000 cases a year, ranging from unidentified remains, sexual assaults, property crimes, any case type. We also do consulting so I do think, our research and our services go hand in hand. We work with agencies all across the country and actually, internationally as well and that is law enforcement attorneys, crime labs, and anthropologists and non governmental organizations and so in providing these diverse services, we're in a unique way to see the challenges that our customers are facing and the needs of the community so that often drives our decisions and what research grants we apply for because our goal is to always make them applicable, something that can directly help solve these cases. And then, like wise, our participation in the research then benefits the services because it makes sure that we're using the best technology to help these cases.

I think they really go hand in hand and as a service provider, we see ourself as a partner to the labs and programs and it's, you know, most public labs don't have the resources to do a lot of research so that's another area we can help the community in doing this research and making it widely available so that other labs, the entire field can benefit from the research.

I'm glad you mentioned it because NIJ is so focused on transitioning technologies, right? Into the practice and crime labs, into investigator's hands and without a research partner, making sure that the methods are validated and working correctly. We just don't have ‑‑ it's very difficult for a crime lab or law enforcement to make that leap until the embedded. I like that you said, because it's great to have people in the cutting edge to apply this work. Speaking of cutting edge work, I'm going to go back to Brandon. Brandon, we know Tennessee committed itself so advancing the use of DNA technologies across the state by basically IGG or investigative Genealogy or forensic investigative Genealogy, whatever we want to call it. Can you talk about how it happened in Tennessee and about some of the successes you guys have had since taking on that technology?

Yes, absolutely. So you know, I have been working on cold cases, especially my whole investigative career and I really had a passion for it and really enjoy it. With that, has come several unidentified human remain cases. Some being children. I worked on one case, for 17 years before we even got the identification. So you know, early on law enforcement would hit this CODIS wall. That's what we call it. You do everything that you can do whether it was you trying to identify a suspect or a victim, you would hit this CODIS wall and you would get DNA and it would say, no matches. So you just waited. Sometimes those worked out where someone was arrested in a profile was entered in it but that wall was so hard to get past so we began to look for something and get over that wall and you know, enter forensic genetic Genealogy, FGG is what I will call it. Since that time, we have seen great successes.

We started to evaluate our cases as an agency and found out we had 479 cold cases at TBI. That's not counting cases we assist local agencies on. We begin evaluating those cases for submission. Through this process, we could write a grant that allowed us to deal with the suspect DNA on cold case homicides and sexual assaults and then we were able to get funding from our governor in Tennessee to specifically target 14 unidentified human remain cases and I'm happy to report from the 14, we have identified 7 already through this technology. (Applause).

It's been huge! It's been a great thing for our agency. It's become the gold standard. Not only that, but we're not just using this technology now with cold cases and unidentified. We are using it on modern cases and seeing great successes as well.

I'm glad you brought up the CODIS wall. So Heather, we're talking about the success rate of FGG with unidentified human remians of missing persons because if you're in CODIS, there's different layers to CODIS and it's am complex system but is FGG better for identifying human remains than traditional CODIS methods in your opinion?

Oh my!So I would say traditional DNA and the markers it relies on, STI markers, are intended for these direct‑direct comparisons of the same individual. It's very successful when used in that application. You can even look at the CODIS statistics from the forensic index and see over 50% of the time, you have a hit and investigative intelligence is provided through that pathway.

It is really not enough information to provide these more long distance family connections. You're talking about 20 different points of data you're generating when we are talking about the crumby old bone samples we're usually dealing with, with unidentified human remains. You may not even produce the full profile so you have half as many points of comparison so at best, you're looking at parentage relationships where you're only sharing half of that information. Or you go out 25% or less.

You can quickly exhaust that technology's ability to make those more distinct connections and that's where the strength of forensic investigative genetic Genealogy comes in. Instead of collecting data at 20 points, we're talking about over 600,000 to over a million points of comparison. So that allows us to make these much more long distance connections to people you don't recognize under your family table as actual family members and do help in ultimately making identifications in these cases. From that standpoint, I do think it's the strength of that technology and we see it represented at least in the metrics that we track on NamUs so with this, we talked about the forensic indexing CODIS, that success rate can drop from over 50% to somewhere between 13 to 16%.

Conversely, when we look at the metrics, we have with Genealogy, we funded upwards of about 200 cases right now and we do see that 50% solve rate.

We're back to bones again. People don't really understand that not all human remains are in poor conditions so fingerprints still work, dental IDs, there's many ways to identify an individual but it's the really difficult cases where we are looking at research. So Erin, both BODI and the University of Tennessee has had a long history of being NIJ grantees and improving forensic science. So can you tell me how your partnership came about and why? Why is it so important?

Yes, certainly! The partnership really goes back, really to 2001. BODI was testing human remains from the world trade center. We were contracted the day after 9‑11 and in total, tested over 20,000 human remains and at the time, Dr.Amy who now works with Dawnie from the University of Tennessee, as a professor of forensic anthropology and at that time, she was at the office of medical examiner so we were working with her directly on this testing.

Over time people started to notice some surprising results. The conventional wisdom at the time, and it really was, just that, just conventional wisdom of experience and what we heard from others is that long bones are always the best for DNA, testing the femur and what we found is that the very small hand and foot bones are performing the best and were getting great results. That came to a surprise to everyone. We realized, you know, it had never been imperially studied so when Amy left and joined the University of Tennessee, that's the first project we did together, was to essentially do a rank study of every single bone in the human body and rank them based on DNA yield.

So the first study we had together looked at the DNA yield of skeletons from the surface. Years later, the study was repeated looking at buried remains and were those results consistent or not? And then that led to other partnerships, other studies that we have done together. In total, we have done four now, at least and it's a partnership that we really value. We're really proud of. It's been so beneficial. The University of Tennessee has a world class program. We always love working with them.

I think it's important to bring the perspectives of both the anthropologist and the DNA scientists together because in real case work, it is best served when there's a multi‑disciplinary approach so similarly, the research benefits from being multi‑disciplinary as well. And I think also bringing the perspective of both industry and academia together but there's been a lot of advancements that have come out of this but that study I mentioned about the DNA yield, this is something we do on the daily basis. We use it on the NamUs program. Like, if Brandon called and said, he has a case and only five bones available, which one should he send in? It would allow us to give the recommendation based on science. We have a paper we can share to support it. Sometimes people are surprised by it because they always want to go back to the long bone. Say, they don't have a femur and they want to submit the arm bone and we say, oh, arm bones don't perform very well. You would be better off sending something else but we have data to back it up and that study has been cited worldwide. It has helped in quite a few cases because if they submitted the bone wasn't great, maybe that case would still be unsolved and they would have given up and moved on. So it has benefited our cases and does so on a daily basis so yes, we really value the partnership.

I'm dying to know, what is the best know? Like, what is the top bone?

So it sort of depends. Our submission guidelines, we typically say, I said hand and foot bones. We like to test the hand and the foot bones, intact molars work very well! The femur is still good because it's bigger and it tends to favor harsher environments if it's been exposed to elements for a long time. It gives us more to sample, you know, sometimes with a small bone, it may be consumed in the testing but at least with the femur, there's more to go back to.

So we generally recommend submitting two to three so a molar, hand foot bone, and a femur and also the portion of the skull helps really well for preserving DNA over a period of time so if it's been exposed to elements for a long time and it's an older case, we can recommend that instead.

Thank you. Now I know. Dawnie, Erin was just talking about the collaboration but my understanding is that the University of Tennessee Knoxville has an anatomical donation program. We recognize this as being a huge advantage in forensic science for a University to have this type of program. Can you talk more about the program for this audience? They don't ‑‑ they're not in the donation realm and why this is important and how it's been so successful?

So the mission of the forensic anthropology center is to conduct research and training that directly serves the criminal justice system. The heart and soul of every thing we do, all of the research we do with BODI and other partners is people who donate body for the purpose of research and training and forensic science.

We now have over 6,000 pre donors. That's people who have registered while they're living to donate their bodies to us upon their passing. We have another 2,000 donors who have already come, been accepted as donors. The motivations for why they do that, we're doing a survey to figure it out but a large part of it, is because they have interests in the criminal justice system, in forensic science and they want to be a part of it. We have a body donation packet that people can fill out and it includes their medical history, their residential history for isotope research. And their height and weight and eye color and hair color and all of these things we use in epigenetic research and things like that so it's documented as we can see of what we can think research down the line will need. And so these individuals come and we place them for decomposition research, at the anthropology research facility, commonly known as the body farm. They stay there and then they're asessioned into the UTK donated skeletal collection where they used for research and teaching forever. These are developing new identification techniques, looking at diseases in the skeletons, some epidemiology and things like that. So there's really no end to the gift of body donation and that's one of the draws that people who wish to donate their body to science, donate to us. Not only because they can see and hear about immediate results in forensic science but they can teach us for instance. It's run by five amazing women and Mary Davis, one of them, helped to redesign our body donation documents and be came up with what we call enhanced consent which we think is very important.

People can opt in or opt out for different types of research. Trauma research, DNA research, research that evolves their bio metrics and faces and things like that so it gives people more agency about how their bodies, their information is used even after they're deceased.

I know you mentioned on the side, you mentioned isotope research. Can you explain about that particular tract and how isotopes are important?

So isotopes are essentially, make up ‑‑ okay. Let me start again. So your bones and teeth are made up of minerals and those minerals are variations of isotopes, different weights of the minerals that are in your bones. You are what you eat and drink, so different isotopes are taken into your skeleton and into your teeth in different stages of your life span. It's true for all of us and what is really cool about isotopes is that depending on where you live and the water you drink when you're young, versus where you are now, and the food that you're eating in the water you're drinking now, we can see variations in those isotopes based on an individual's residential history.

So that can sometimes help us narrow down who had an individual might be who is missing because we can do isotopes and figure out their residential history. So even though they may have passed away, died in Tennessee, they might not be from Tennessee. They might be from California. And we can see that in their bones and in their teeth and that can help law enforcement narrow down who they might be looking for. Not someone from Tennessee, but someone from California or at least the American southwest that's very important. So we get information from the residential history, all of the places they have lived, how long they have lived there and now we're getting information about their diet as well.

So we think that might have some sort of, agency, over their isotopes.

That is very cool. I think I'm taking a little bit of Pittsburgh home with me in my isotope.

Just a little bit.

Certainly some of the sandwiches I ate yesterday are coming home with me. Brandon, can you tell or talk to the audience a little bit about what you thinks makes a good cold case unit when it comes to an unidentified missing persons? What do you think is the combination that works the best for TBI? And how can it be applied?

That's a really good question. So this is kind of like us sitting here, right? Law enforcement has come a long way. And in the end, a lot of us are just dumb cops and that's okay. We have come a long way from gum shoe method. You look at the way that investigation was done so many years ago and it's changed. Law enforcement investigators are expected to have a completely different, knowledge base than what we did even twenty years ago. You have to know a little bit about DNA and a little bit about anthropology and so many different things.

So to be successful, it does involve training and experience. I think it's bringing together a team of people who are able to offer different things in the complex cases. It doesn't just involve good investigators and bringing on retired folks who have worked for years and years but it also involves having a team of forensic scientists. We have ones where I can pick up the phone and say, de‑science it for me. Give it to me in cop speak so I can understand it. We have intelligence that understand the places to look and how to utilize NamUs in a very advance way. We have to bring all of these people, together to make it successful.

Heather, if I'm a law enforcement officer and I'm thinking about the possibility of using investigative genetic genealogy on a case like, what steps should we take to get started? What is the first thing they should know, whether the case is even eligible for that type of work?

So the very first thing I would say is that while it is an exciting tool, it's not the only tool to help solve your case and what they should do is exhaust all other bio metric comparisons and investigative approaches prior to even considering forensic investigative genetic genealogy. If you just like at NamUs, like, the FBI fingerprint unit. We have helped resolve over 600 unidentified cases by rerunning the print cards that had been run previously because through advances made possible by research, you know, you had improvements to the algorithms that help search those fingerprints as we transitioned from the FBI's AFIS system to the database they use today as well as identifying efficiencies and all of the other tools we pulled together with that fingerprint workflow including off learn searching that has helped us, you know, obtain these resolutions in cases where they thought it was something that had been exhausted.

We added tattoo basis. We just had a case that was solved through FGG testing which is very exciting but when we saw that we also had the missing persons record in the database, I always go back to dig through to see why it hadn't hit previously and in working at the missing person, there was great photographs and descriptions of a tattoo he had on his chest with his three children's names and date of birth.

So I went back to the unidentified persons record and it was not skeletal, it was a fresh case in that particular instance. What we had was no photograph and just a description from the medical examiner of, tattoo on chest.

So that is a great example of what you put in is what you get out of the NamUs system. If they had documented photographs of the tattoo with a verbal description of what they saw on that tattoo, that probably would have been solved much sooner and cheaper than what they obtained with genealogy. So again, really making sure that you're utilizing the NamUs system and you're exhausting all of the other avenues before looking at genealogy as an option. And then once you are pursuing FGG and making sure everyone has come together and talked about that and our on board with pursuing it as the next step and then working with the lab. That's providing the genetic profile, the one that is using for genealogy searching because you can work with the best genealogy in the world on that case but very similarly, kind of garbage in, garbage out. If you have a noisy or incomplete profile, it didn't go through clean up steps to deal with the bacterial contamination, your genealogy is not going to find information they would have been able to or even worse, we have seen where they actually come to an incorrect conclusion because they were not working with a quality sample to start with.

You know, Heather, I learn something new every time we have conversations surrounding cases. One thing we haven't touched on and I just got a touch on it. When we think about solving unidentified human remains cases, in a lot of these cases, there is so many of these individuals who could be a victim of crime. So forensics in some cases when we look at tattoos and fingerprints, identifying a person does not always show up in court. We still believe in validation, forensic science over the last 15 years, have been improving quality. NIJ has invested a lot in trying to help put communities of scientists and the courts and law enforcement understand the validity and excellence behind the techniques that are being used. Dawnie, I was going to ask you, because forensic science tends to be frequently challenged, how is your research helping to validate the techniques that support like national and even international work?

So in forensic science, you know, we see a lot of techniques based on, sound principles and sound assumption or basic underlying principles and Erin has the best example, I can think of, of what happens when those principles become fact or those assumption become principle or fact but never actually been tested. That is exactly what Amy's research was with BODI is to test whether the femur is truly the best bone to submit for DNA and son of a gun if it wasn't. So forensic anthropology is set up nicely because of our donors and resources to do the basic science testing and the NIJ basic science grants are perfect for that to allow us to allow researchers to test basic scientific assumption and find out is this validated or is this not? So that DNA example is a good one.

Another one that we did was based on several studies where we had multiple individuals at the facility at the same time. Based on 40 years of research at the forensic anthropology center, at the body farm, we know how important external variables are to decomposition, such as insect access to body and temperature. We all know that as things get warmer and insects are more active and bodies decompose faster. We always thought there was external variables.

We did some studies for NIJ where we were placing donors, multiple donors at the same time, same location, same season, out of the facility, and getting very different results in how they were decomposing. External variables are all the same. So we started to think, something is going on inside of the body. So we developed a study to look at how drugs and end of life diseases effect decomposition. We found out, it really does!

The body has agency over its own decomposition in very complex ways which means that even, forensic entomology, which studies the maggots and the maggot development on a body, we now know we need to test maggots for drugs because cocaine speeds up their development and bar bit CHUTs slow it down and they really like diabetic bodies but they're not hot on people with cancer and decomposition so it delays colonization and it has really changed our basic assumption about forensic entomology and things like that.

We're looking at things like remote sensing right now. My colleagues are looking at remote sensing to see which techniques are best for different terrain, for different life spans of a grave. So we can better go out with law enforcement and advise them on which tools to use for their particular case so they're not wasting time and money on tool technology they have in their toolkit but is completely unreliable for the task at hand.

That basic research, that basic validation, I think is the heart of forensic science and is extremely important.

Thank you! I think it's time for the lightning round. So starting with Heather, and ending with the pup, ready for a lightning round in one minute. If you have one suggestion for the use and what would it be?

We have seen a lot of cases that failed to produce traditional DNA profiles, STR profiles and are very successful in still producing snip profiles for investigative genealogy and that is in large part thanks to the funding and research, the national institute of justice provides the community. I think there's still a lot of work to be done there to ensure the application of that to the broadest group of cases that could benefit from that. Also, the introduction to the statistics, particularly in absence of STR data, to allow cases to take full advantage and leverage that new technology.

Brandon?

Okay. So I would say education. When I first heard of FGG, I said, what had did you call me? It took me a minute. So I think that's a big part of it. Educating law enforcement that this technology exists, how to use it, when to use it, and educating the public so that those phone calls I make on a random Tuesday, when I ask for someone's DNA for reference, I don't have to convince them, I'm not a Saudi Arabian prince asking to steel their Social Security number. That would help. That would help get our reference pool higher and then, again, the courts too. The district attorney general as well as judges, so they can understand this technology and that it's solving cases. It's making murder harder to get way with.

Thanks, I like that sound byte. Erin?

Sure, yes. I think we have advanced forensic science in the DNA realm, any time we can do more with less. More information from less samples or more of a compromised sample to echo what Heather said, I think there's a lot of untapped potential in sequencing. I think FIG was probably the push that the community needed to go into sequencing. Now, a lot of labs going into genetic genealogy now have the equipment to do other sequencing applications if it wasn't for FIG, they wouldn't necessarily have that and I think there's so much to do here now with sequencing and I'm excited that NIJ is supporting research in that area.

Dawnie?

I think beyond the day to day case work, I think we need to also look forward towards more mass fatality event, humanitarian work that involves DNA. The world trade center response really drove DNA technology. I think we would all agree. That advanced significantly.

The databases, the access that we can get to DNA in mass fatality responses so that we can return remains to families faster, in these sorts of responses, I think is going to be ‑‑ always important and going to be more important moving forward. HONDO says wildlife DNA forensics. (Laughing).

That's a good one. We support that too. So that concludes this panel. I think we're ready to take some questions. I did want to mention that if you liked what had you saw here, you can rate it using your app. So there it is! All right. So any questions from the audience? I cannot see so just ‑‑ okay. Please.

Hi, I'm James Anderson and I'm in the justice at the BRAIN cooperation, but this is more of a question to NIJ. The question, is this making a weird echo, I will talk loudly ‑‑ no? Okay. So really the question is, how whether the use and implementation of forensic science is a key priority? And I ask that because on the one hand, the science that NIJ funded is amazing! You are all doing incredible things. On the other hand, something like one‑third of wrongful convictions involve shotty or just terrible forensic science and it's not hard to find the whole series of just poor science that leads to terrible outcomes and if you talk to detectives too, they're frustrated with the way that the forensic lab capacity has taken up doing the cases that go to trial and the DA is worried about some kind of, completely crazy jury theory they got from CSI or something.

So I guess I would urge NIJ to prioritize, really studying and thinking carefully about the use and dare I say, implementation of forensic science. And the way, particularly in forensic context, it's hard to present to lay jurors and judges and I would venture, if you go to any courtroom in this country today, it would not be hard to find some mediocre science, let's say it that way.

Let me just say, I'm so glad that you just brought this up. One thing we know is that a lot of the forensics used that have triggered or what had gotten blame for the wrongful convictions in the past has changed. People aren't using bite marks anymore, or very little. So NIJ's work in it changing hair analysis is no longer applied which is responsible for a large number of wrongful convictions. I think, DNA itself and the advances of DNA, we're now seeing it causing exonerations so it has not only been applied to prosecute but to in a post conviction sense, to exonerate, right?

And then I think the other thing, which I'm glad you brought up is that the ‑‑ oh, geez, I almost forgot my point. NIJ is involved and understanding the complexities that are happening in the courtroom. We are participating at federal level with our partners and also at AAAS and NIST, we recognize that in this country, we don't have a science court. So judges, juries are not educated on the newer techniques and crossing that, is something that NIJ is trying to contribute with, to educate the defense prosecutors judges and general people so that ‑‑ I can't imagine how difficult AI is to explain at some point in the future.

It's not really I in forensics right now but just the process of generative, explain it in court? I think that's extremely difficult for a judge and a jury so thank you for your question.

Lucas, can I say one thing?

Yes, sure.

Let's call what it is, junk science is out there and we have to call it out. Third molar aging is junk science. Cadaver dogs, not junk science but we don't understand the limit of detection so sometimes things are said in court that are beyond what we understand. So I am old enough now and cranky enough that I can study it and call it out and no one can hurt me so that's a lot of the research that we do. But I would with agree that taking on junk science because once is it in the courts, it's precedent.

Divining rods, that type of stuff is in now. We are to fight it and the more that NIJ can help forensic science fight bad forensic science that is not science, the better off the whole field is going to be.

Hi, I'm one of the student scholarship awardees and a student at Georgia State University. (Applause). Thank you. I just wanted to ask as someone from Atlanta where we see a lot of, like, misrepresentation and police data, specifically in DNA data, where often races and ethnic groups are put on the back burner when it comes to missing cases and how are you at NamUs and BODI and the University of Tennessee, are making sure that DNA testing is equitable to all races and ethnicities?

I can take a first stab at that, I think. So the national institute of justice is very aware of some of the challenges and complexities that minority populations in the U.S. face when dealing with their missing and unidentified persons issues. There is a whole initiative supporting that issue as it pertains to tribal and affiliated Native American Indians. On NamUs, we have dedicated tribal liaisons that work within the community to help increase reporting and entry into the system. We have also been able to prioritize all of those requests that we have received for forensic testing. We also network with a number of other entities including the Black and Missing Foundation in here and a number of others to make sure that they are aware that within the NamUs program, it doesn't have to be law enforcement that enters the case. It could be an advocate or a family member so there's a number of ways that we can work within the community and our connections to ensure that we do see equal representation of those cases within the database and the system.

Thank you so much!

Thank you for your question.

Thank you all very much. This was incredibly informative. I'm a prosecutor to it's good to know this stuff is coming to a courtroom near you. But my question goes to the point of developing these huge DNA databases, right? You have GSK that just bought 23 and me. You guys are obviously assembling an enormous database and be whether you like it or not, it's a genetic Social Security number. So once it is there, how can you protect? How can you keep it? And is the science developing the right of privately for relatives of the victim and what point does this database become almost like a public record? Thank you! 

So thank you. NIJ does not have a DNA database or does not DNA database. CODIS is a database, highly recollected by the FBI. The ethical concerns you bring up with the larger databases that are being used for things like that, like, family tree DNA, there's only a couple of them now that can be ‑‑ there's three of them. There are, it's the policy and laws that our individuals and groups of individuals. I went to great NIJ talk from NIH who is looking at developing policy around your right to privacy and the data being used for these things. It's absolutely an essential question. The U.S. needs to be vigilant about this type of information. It's extremely powerful and education, which Brandon brought up, is part of that. There are people that do not know the power of their own DNA and how they can be leaving it around the room right now. Letting people understand that from very early on that this is theirs and a part of them and if they give it to the database, they should be aware of how it could be used. Next question.

Hello, my name is Alyssa with the center for violence prevention research. My question is also about, well, specifically missing and murdered and indigenous people in this country. I did read about the travel liaison which is awesome and I saw she's very helpful in helping other tribal agencies enter these missing people into the database.

I'm curious since that was started, in terms of solving these cases specifically, what those rates have been and what kinds of challenges are associated with solving those cases?

So our tribal liaison, we're fortunate that she's tribally affiliated herself from the Diné group in the Navajo nation and she worked several decades as law enforcement with that community. She's kind of well aware and is educated us on the challenges that those community members face and a lot of that is similar to what we see in other rural agencies in terms of being resource, but also to a different degree. And also, having kind of very broad diverse geographic regions that are isolated and hard to get to for search efforts or even for reporting efforts, and that's not uniform, even, across the tribal groups that we work with because I think if we look at Navajo as an example versus the groups that we work with in Alaska, those are very different types of challenges that they face. So it's a lot of education and NIJ has prioritized in making sure we're talking to the appropriate community members to be informed on what those challenges are for each of those groups across the country so we can come up with strategies to work with them and help ensure that we are supportive regardless of the challenges might be.

And I also want to add, we, I know that the records that are from tribal individuals in NamUs, we have spent a lot of effort to make sure those records are correct. That the fields are updated and there's a lot of disconnect. We know that underserved populations, that there's often not trust with the police or with law enforcement, you know? So we want to close the gaps and reach across to make sure that people understand that this database is there to help. And it can't always solve a case of a missing person but the more information that is in it, the better position we're going to be.

So unfortunately, we're at time. I know there's a couple of people who want to ask questions. I would invite you to come to the stage afterwards. We're going to do a quick photo and then our panelist will be available to answer any questions that you have. Let's give a big round of applause for this fantastic panel!(Applause).

And this is the QR code where you can take your phone. Why don't you do that before you handout to the next panels. Thanks and see you around!