Cooperative Agreement 70NANB18H029

The Alameda County Sheriff's Office Crime Laboratory will utilize a $386,800 grant award from the Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Assistance under the Paul Coverdell Forensic Sciences Improvement Grant Program to purchase specialized firearms 3D high-capacity imaging and analysis systems and an associated warranty. The laboratory will employ a patented hardware platform and fifteen cartridge case scanning tray capable of scanning multiple calibers of...

This $746,866 federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Research, Evaluation, and Development Project Grants program (CFDA 16.560) will fund a comprehensive, multiphasic study to characterize the emerging forensic discipline of hand image comparison. The key products and services to be delivered under this 3-year award include: Establishing a Hand Comparison Working Group (HAND-WG) to provide expert input on the study's approaches Conducting a survey to...

This $149,554 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program will fund research at Arizona State University from October 2022 through August 2023. The research aims to quantify the validity of fired cartridge case comparison as a forensic technique under realistic field conditions. Specifically, the project will investigate whether conventional peer review procedures effectively discover forensic errors before conclusions are...

This Project Grant award of $205,090 from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Research, Evaluation, and Development Project Grants program (CFDA 16.560) aims to develop a master set of physical cartridge cases and bullets that can be replicated and distributed to forensic laboratories. This will enable them to validate new three-dimensional (3D) imaging systems for firearm forensics without the need to conduct their own extensive validation studies, which are time- and resource-intensive....

This federal Project Grant award, provided by the National Institute of Justice under the Forensics Training and Technical Assistance Program (CFDA 16.044), aims to calibrate a proposed conclusion scale for pattern comparison disciplines by computing consensus-based likelihood ratios. The $609,185 award to the Trustees of Indiana University, which runs from January 1, 2024 to December 31, 2026, has three primary deliverables: Publish the image pairs, examiner response distributions, and...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) under the CFDA 16.560 National Institute of Justice Research, Evaluation, and Development Project Grants program provides $179,968 to Marshall University Research Corporation to conduct research aimed at improving the reliability of data interpretation in forensic fire debris analysis. The research will focus on two key activities: (1) creating a ground truth data set of physical fire debris samples to assess factors...

This Cooperative Agreement award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the Federal Grant Program for Measurement Science and Engineering (CFDA 11.609), provides $199,989 to the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) to conduct research on forensic facial examiner performance and methods for effectively combining human and machine face recognition systems. The key products and services to be delivered include: Administering a test to forensic examiners to assess their...

This $128,425 Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance (CFDA 16.742 - Paul Coverdell Forensic Sciences Improvement Grant Program) will support the Travis County Sheriff's Office (TCSO) Forensic Services Division in Texas. The funding will be used to purchase and establish a firearm test firing station near the TCSO Forensic Services Division, enabling them to test fire all seized and found guns brought in as evidence. This will allow TCSO to promptly...

This $980,527 federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Justice (CFDA 16.560 - National Institute of Justice Research, Evaluation, and Development Project Grants) aims to enhance and expand the HirisPlex-S (HPS) forensic DNA phenotyping tool for predicting an individual's physical appearance traits such as eye, hair, and skin color. The key objectives are to: 1) develop quantitative prediction models to complement the existing HPS web-based tool, 2) utilize deep learning to...

This federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), under the NIJ Research, Evaluation, and Development Project Grants program (CFDA 16.560), provides $872,282 to Noblis, Inc., a nonprofit research organization, to conduct a comprehensive study on the accuracy, efficacy, and reproducibility of muzzle-to-target distance determinations using gunshot residue (GSR) analysis by practicing forensic examiners. The study aims to assist in the standardization of GSR distance...