Advance Your Research Skills
CSAFE, a NIST Center of Excellence, values talented young scientists interested in partnering with us to improve the United States criminal justice system. Our team is increasing the scientific foundations of pattern and digital evidence through innovative research and training opportunities. Alongside contributing to the fair administration of justice, our dynamic community is passionate about mentoring the next generation of leading researchers.
With CSAFE, students gain valuable professional experience and prepare for a career in the criminal justice, forensic science, judicial and related fields. We invite students committed to innovation and excellence to inquire about our available opportunities.
Upcoming Events
Registration is now open for these available events.
Webinar: Using Mixture Models to Examine Group Differences: An Illustration Involving the Perceived Strength of Forensic Science Evidence
Thursday, December 9 at 9:00 am - 10:00 am CSTWebinar: Improving Forensic Decision Making: a Human-Cognitive Perspective
Thursday, February 17, 2022 at 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm CSTSummer Opportunities
Are you looking for an internship this summer? Here are four programs accepting applications now!
CSAFE REU at Iowa State University
CSAFE REU AT IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
REU, or Research Experience for Undergraduates, is CSAFE’s ten-week, immersive summer internship program where students discover how statistical and computational concepts apply to CSAFE’s key research areas in pattern or digital evidence. REU students work toward achieving CSAFE’s core mission of building a statistically sound and scientifically solid foundation for the analysis and interpretation of forensic evidence.
NIST SUMMER UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP (SURF)
CSAFE partner, NIST, operates A summer program called SURF. The SURF program is designed to inspire undergraduate students to pursue careers in STEM through a unique research experience that supports the NIST mission. For 11 weeks, SURF students contribute to the ongoing research of one of the six NIST facilities. Students work under the mentorship of a NIST scientist or engineer.
DATA SCIENCE FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD YOUNG SCHOLARS PROGRAM
The Data Science for the Public Good (DSPG) Young Scholars program is an immersive summer program that engages students from across Iowa to work together on projects that address local and state government challenges around critical social issues relevant in the world today. DSPG resident scholars conduct research at the intersection of statistics, computation and the social sciences to determine how information generated within every community can be leveraged to improve quality of life and inform public policy.
RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES AT CSAFE
CSAFE undergraduate research positions will advance your problem solving, professional communication and research skills. You will work alongside our team of statisticians, scientists, post-doctoral scholars and graduate students on complex and challenging projects in areas such as firearms, handwriting, bloodspatter and shoeprint analysis. These academic initiatives provide future forensic science professionals with hands-on opportunities to learn about the roles statistics and computational analysis play in both research and the field.
Available Resources
For Students
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Assessing the resources and requirements of statistics education in forensic science
Type: Poster Research Area(s): Training and Education
Published: 2020 | By: Xiaoyi Yang
With the increasing ability to easily collect and analyze data, statistics plays a more critical role in scientific research activities, such as designing experiments, controlling processes, and understanding or validating lab results. As a result, incorporating statistics training into the…
Statistical Methods for the Forensic Analysis of User-Event Data
Type: Dissertation,Publication Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Christopher Galbraith
A common question in forensic analysis is whether two observed data sets originate from the same source or from different sources. Statistical approaches to addressing this question have been widely adopted within the forensics community, particularly for DNA evidence, providing…
Statistical methods for digital image forensics: Algorithm mismatch for blind spatial steganalysis and score-based likelihood ratios for camera device identification
Type: Dissertation,Publication Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Stephanie Reinders
Forensic science currently faces a variety of challenges. Statistically suitable reference databases need to be developed and maintained. Subjective methods that can introduce bias need to be replaced by objective methods. Highly technical forensic methods need to be clearly and…
Bayesian hierarchical modeling for the forensic evaluation of handwritten documents
Type: Dissertation,Publication Research Area(s): Handwriting
Published: 2020 | By: Amy Crawford
The analysis of handwritten evidence has been used widely in courts in the United States since the 1930s (Osborn, 1946). Traditional evaluations are conducted by trained forensic examiners. More recently, there has been a movement toward objective and probability-based evaluation…
A Pioneer in Forensic Science Reform: The Work of Paul Giannelli
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2018 | By: Brandon Garrett
Few can say, "I told you so," to our entire criminal justice system. Being right about what is wrong with the use of evidence in criminal cases is not a bad thing, but being able to influence the growing response…
Probabilistic Reporting in Criminal Cases in the United States: A Baseline Study
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: Simon Cole
Forensic evidence reporting shows a high degree of adherence to prevailing disciplinary standards. Probabilistic reporting of forensic results remains rare. Probabilistic reports were mostly subjective verbal assignments of posterior probabilities.
Statistical methods for digital image forensics: Algorithm mismatch for blind spatial steganalysis and score-based likelihood ratios for camera device identification
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Stephanie Reinders
Forensic science currently faces a variety of challenges. Statistically suitable reference databases need to be developed and maintained. Subjective methods that can introduce bias need to be replaced by objective methods. Highly technical forensic methods need to be clearly and…
Open Forensic Science in R
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2019 | By: Samantha Tyner
This book is for anyone looking to do forensic science analysis in a data-driven and open way. Whether you are a student, teacher, or scientist, this book is for you. We take the latest research, primarily from the Center for Statistics and…
Statistical Methods for the Forensic Analysis of User-Event Data
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Chris Galbraith
A common question in forensic analysis is whether two observed data sets originate from the same source or from different sources. Statistical approaches to addressing this question have been widely adopted within the forensics community, particularly for DNA evidence, providing…
Hunting wild stego images, a domain adaptation problem in digital image forensics
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Li Lin
Digital image forensics is a field encompassing camera identication, forgery detection and steganalysis. Statistical modeling and machine learning have been successfully applied in the academic community of this maturing field. Still, large gaps exist between academic results and applications used…
How Can a Forensic Result Be a ‘Decision’? A Critical Analysis of Ongoing Reforms of Forensic Reporting Formats for Federal Examiners
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: Simon A. Cole
The decade since the publication of the 2009 National Research Council report on forensic science has seen the increasing use of a new word to describe forensic results. What were once called “facts,” “determinations,” “conclusions,” or “opinions,” are increasingly described…
Quantifying the similarity of 2D images using edge pixels: An application to the forensic comparison of footwear impressions
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2020 | By: Soyoung Park
We propose a novel method to quantify the similarity between an impression (Q) from an unknown source and a test impression (K) from a known source. Using the property of geometrical congruence in the impressions, the degree of correspondence is…
Quantifying the similarity of 2D images using edge pixels: An application to the forensic comparison of footwear impressions
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2020 | By: Soyoung Park
We propose a novel method to quantify the similarity between an impression (Q) from an unknown source and a test impression (K) from a known source. Using the property of geometrical congruence in the impressions, the degree of correspondence is…
A database of two-dimensional images of footwear outsole impressions
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2020 | By: Soyoung Park
Footwear outsole images were obtained from 150 pairs of used shoes. The motivation for constructing the database was to enable a statistical analysis of two-dimensional (2D) images of shoe outsoles, to understand within shoe (between replicate images of the same…
Statistical Methods for the Forensic Analysis of Geolocated Event Data
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Christopher Galbraith
A common question in forensic analysis is whether two observed data sets originated from the same source or from different sources. Statistical approaches to addressing this question have been widely adopted within the forensics community, particularly for DNA evidence. Here…
Statistical methods for the forensic analysis of geolocated event data
Type: Publication Research Area(s):
Published: 2020 | By: Chris Galbraith
A common question in forensic analysis is whether two observed data sets originated from the same source or from different sources. Statistical approaches to addressing this question have been widely adopted within the forensics community, particularly for DNA evidence. Here…
Implementation of a Blind Quality Control Program in a Forensic Laboratory
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice,Latent Print
Published: 2019 | By: Callan Hund
A blind quality control (QC) program was successfully developed and implemented in the Toxicology, Seized Drugs, Firearms, Latent Prints (Processing and Comparison), Forensic Biology, and Multimedia (Digital and Audio/Video) sections at the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC). The program was…
Comparison of three similarity scores for bullet LEA matching
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Firearms and Toolmarks
Published: 2020 | By: Susan VanderPlas
Recent advances in microscopy have made it possible to collect 3D topographic data, enabling more precise virtual comparisons based on the collected 3D data as a supplement to traditional comparison microscopy and 2D photography. Automatic comparison algorithms have been introduced…
Error Rates, Likelihood Ratios, and Jury Evaluation of Forensic Evidence
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: Brandon Garrett
Forensic examiners regularly testify in criminal cases, informing the jurors whether crime scene evidence likely came from a source. In this study, we examine the impact of providing jurors with testimony further qualified by error rates and likelihood ratios, for…
The Costs and Benefits of Forensics
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: Brandon L. Garrett
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote that states can be laboratories for experimentation in law and policy. Disappointingly, however, the actual laboratories that states and local governments run are not a home for experimentation. We do not have adequate…
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