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Statisticians Well-Represented on Forensic Science Reform Oversight Body

  

[May 2016 Update: Statisticians are encouraged to apply to serve on OSAC here: https://www.nist.gov/forensics/osac-application.cfm.

Other updates to the appointments

January 2017 Update: Here are more recent appointments

NIST this week announced the final appointments to the the Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC), the NIST-administered body to strengthen forensic science through the identification and development of standards and guidelines. OSAC is composed of an oversight board, three resources committees, five committees, 24 subcommittees (see schematic below) and totals several hundred appointments of forensic science practitioners and administrators, researchers, professional association representatives, and industry representatives.

Recognizing the importance of statistics to bolstering the forensic sciences, statisticians are well represented in OSAC. This summer, Karen Kafadar, Hal Stern, Bruce Weir, and William Guthrie were appointed to, respectively, the Forensic Science Standards Board, the Physics/Pattern Committee, the Biology/DNA Committee, and the Chemistry/Instrumental Analysis Committee. On November 3, members of most of the subcommittees were announced and the following statisticians were among the appointees:

Statisticians have also been appointed to other important forensic science panels. In January, Stephen Fienberg was named to the newly established National Committee on Forensic Science (NCFS), a federal committee jointly overseen by NIST and the U.S. Department of Justice. Following her appointment this fall to the Forensic Science Standards Board, Kafadar was named to the NCFS Scientific Inquiry and Research Subcommittee. In October, Stern was appointed to the advisory panel for the AAAS project, Forensic Science Assessments: A Quality and Gap Analysis.

 

Many of the above statisticians are members of the ASA Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Forensic Statistics, much of whose activities are described on the ASA website, Promoting Forensic Science Reform. Earlier this year, the committee submitted written comments to NCFS "to enhance scientific thinking to benefit the practice of forensic science." For more details, see this May 2014 ASA Community blog entry, ASA Makes Recommendations on Forensic Science Reform for National Commission on Forensic Science.

For more on the ASA forensic science reform efforts, see these ASA Community blog entries:

See other ASA Science Policy blog entries. For ASA science policy updates, follow @ASA_SciPol on Twitter.        

 

 

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