For the past three years, CSAFE and NIST have been working in close collaboration in a joint effort to improve the statistically-sound and scientifically solid foundation for the analysis and interpretation of forensic evidence as well as provide statistical training for forensic practitioners and legal professionals. The success of this work was recently recognized by the American Statistical Association, which awarded CSAFE and NIST the prestigious Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry and Government (SPAIG) honor on July 30 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Established in 2002, the SPAIG Award recognizes outstanding partnerships that result in significant contributions to the statistical field with applications to real-world problems. The Office of the Vice President for Research at lead institution Iowa State University recently highlighted this accomplishment in their research news, and the Department of Statistics at partner institution University of California, Irvine published a news release with more information. The news was also shared by Business Record, a Des Moines, Iowa publication.
From the articles:
CSAFE Director Alicia Carriquiry emphasized the importance of the CSAFE and NIST partnernship in the ISU news story. “Establishing a close partnership with NIST is a main focus of CSAFE,” Carriquiry said. The funding that CSAFE receives is in the form of a cooperative agreement with NIST, which means that we are successful if the partnership is successful. Getting this award was a nice affirmation of the fact that we are meeting this goal.”
UCI Co-Director Hal Stern echoed this sentiment. “The CSAFE team is excited to receive the award with our NIST partners,” says Stern, “because it reinforces the importance of collaboration among academic and government researchers to make progress on important issues like forensic science.”
Learn more about the role of NIST and the CSAFE collaboration on our blog, and discover details about how our expert team of statisticians are applying statistical and computational methods to forensic science on our research page.
(Photo courtesy of the American Statistical Association)