David Sheets, PhD, director of the graduate program in data analytics and professor of physics, will present a talk at the National Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Baltimore, MD today, Friday, February 22. The talk will cover portions of the work of a joint expert working group of National Institute of Standards (NIST) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on human factors in forensic handwriting examinations. The report of this working group will be published shortly and presents national level guidelines for handling human factors in the forensic handwriting examination.
Sheets will present with other members of the working group, including Melissa Taylor (NIST), Emily Will, private document examiner in Raleigh, NC and Linton Mohammed, PhD, private document examiner in San Francisco, CA.
Sheets’ involvement with the statistics of impression evidence arose from his initial work with researchers from the State University at Buffalo on forensic analysis of human bitemark patterns. His criticisms of the weaknesses in many areas of forensic impression evidence interpretation lead to his invitation to work with the NIST/DOJ panel.
Submitted by: David Sheets, director, Graduate Program in Data Analytics
