Advance Your Research Skills:
Join Our Team
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.
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.
CSAFE conducts three specialized programs for current and future forensic scientists. The OPPTAG program and STEMversity invite pre-college students to participate in hands-on activities including data collection, analysis and interpretation of evidence related to CSAFE research areas. They experience, first-hand, how statistics and forensic science work together from the crime scene to the lab to the courtroom. REU is CSAFE’s ten week, immersive summer internship program where students discover how statistical and computational concepts apply to one of CSAFE’s key research areas in pattern or digital evidence.
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.
Available Resources
For Students
Found 118 Results
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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…
Psychometric Analysis of Forensic Examiner Behavior
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Forensic Statistics,Implementation and Practice
Published: 2019 | By: Amanda Luby
Forensic science often involves the comparison of crime-scene evidence to a known-source sample to determine if the evidence and the reference sample came from the same source. Even as forensic analysis tools become increasingly objective and automated, final source identifications…
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…
How do latent print examiners perceive proficiency testing? An analysis of examiner perceptions, performance, and print quality
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Latent Print
Published: 2020 | By: Sharon Kelley
Proficiency testing has the potential to serve several important purposes for crime laboratories and forensic science disciplines. Scholars and other stakeholders, however, have criticized standard proficiency testing procedures since their implementation in laboratories across the United States. Specifically, many experts…
An Exploratory Analysis of Handwriting Features: Investigating Numeric Measurements of Writing That Are Important for Statistical Modeling
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Handwriting
Published: 2019 | By: Amy Crawford
The goal of this presentation is to provide insights into which features of handwritten documents are important for statistical modeling with the task of writer identification and to discuss how these features overlap with features that questioned document examiners typically…
An algorithm to compare two‐dimensional footwear outsole images using maximum cliques and speeded‐up robust feature
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2020 | By: Soyoung Park
Footwear examiners are tasked with comparing an outsole impression (Q) left at a crime scene with an impression (K) from a database or from the suspect's shoe. We propose a method for comparing two shoe outsole impressions that relies on…
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