Articles Published by NIJ

Two leading funding agencies renew a joint commitment to evaluate and support scientific activities relevant to criminal justice.

Integrating forensic evidence into the intelligence process is an evolutionary next step in reducing, disrupting, and preventing violent crime.

Identifying individuals through next generation DNA sequencing may involve degraded or mixed samples. A researcher has developed a technique to make fragmented DNA more readable, and a method to help pull individual profiles from mixed samples.

Missing persons cases are overwhelming — not just for families, but for communities as a whole. When someone goes missing and is never found, families lack closure. The impact of the loss can spread through the whole community.

Humans transfer trace signatures of unique colonies of microbes on our skin to objects we touch. The tiny size of that signature make it difficult for investigators to identify an individual. Research now has made that identification more likely.

The regions of the genome relied on for identification of individuals pose challenges for analysts because they often produce artifacts during processing. NIJ-funded research has led to a solution that lessens the artifact problem.

Key questions have arisen about how DNA data are to be interpreted statistically. Two NIJ grants have supported research that has far-reaching implications for testing hypotheses using DNA evidence and expressing confidence in the conclusions reached.

Forensic scientists have explored whether lifted and archived fingerprints retain forensically useful amounts of DNA.