by Vicki Smith
The author, a 1987 WVU graduate, is a
correspondent for the Associated Press.

andy Cook is used to getting good grades. He studies hard. He considers himself serious.

But the 20-year-old from Michigan is a little intimidated by the WVU program he entered last fall, a program where failing one class could derail a degree—and a potentially lucrative career.

Cook, of Kaleva, Mich., is among the first students to be admitted to the only school in the world offering a bachelor's degree in forensic identification.

The new curriculum is the brainchild of the FBI and other law enforcement officials who have watched forensics experts being discredited as witnesses, or shot down over the mishandling of evidence or the inability to explain the scientifically complex to a jury of laymen.

FBI Director Louis Freeh noticed that sometimes jurors want academic credentials that prove a witness knows what he's doing. In short, a degree.

Students admitted to WVU's highly competitive program can get one, specializing in either latent fingerprint identification or biometrics. Biometrics employs scanning and analytical techniques to verify a person's identity through unique physical characteristics such as voice patterns that can't be stolen or copied.

Cook is a graduate of West Shore Community College in Ludington, Mich. He found out about the new program through his uncle, an FBI agent, and plans to specialize in biometrics.

"I'm a little bit worried. It's going to be an extremely challenging program. There's at least one class—fingerprinting—that if you don't pass, you're out of the program. That's intimidating. A B's not good enough," Cook said. "It makes sense, though. You can see why it has to be that way."

Psychology Professor Michael Yura, WVU's point man for the new program, said some courses must be strictly pass-fail. "You can get a B or C in a traditional college course and pass, but when you're dealing with human evidence like fingerprints, a C won't cut it," Yura said.

For years, fingerprint specias have trained on the job. But starting in 2005, the International Association for Identification will require a four-year degree for ID specias.

"There are very good people, very credible people, but the people who look at fingerprint cards and try to find a match are dinosaurs," Yura said.

When it comes to fingerprints, sophisticated computer programs do most of the work these days. Still, students must understand and be able to explain the algorithms, Yura said.

"Because of the O.J. Simpson case and some problems with crime labs, juries are not accepting these people on face value anymore," he said. "They're getting burned on their credentials."

During Simpson's wrongful death trial, jurors pored over forensic evidence, reviewing videotapes of evidence collection, reading a biochemist's testimony on the cross-hybridization of DNA samples, and inspecting DNA test strips used by the crime lab. Using specific exhibit numbers, the jury even asked to know "development times" on some of the DNA tests.

Forensic experts "need to know math and physics to be able to explain things like blood spatter. They can't just say a computer program did it," Yura said. "A good educational foundation and practical experience are critical."

At WVU, budding criminas study natural sciences along with such topics as forensic photography, crime scene analysis, computer imagery, scientific and technical writing, "cop talk," and effective testimony.

About 20 students were accepted into the inaugural freshman class, screened from about 650 applicants. Most are thinking about a career in medicine or pathology and trying to find a variety of practical applications.

"This is the perfect degree for people who want to go into law enforcement but not carry a gun," Yura said.

Cook is a good example. "I always kind of wanted to go into law enforcement in some aspect or another, plus I've always enjoyed and excelled in sciences. I had considered majoring in bioengineering at one point. This program is kind of a combination of all three," he said.

A forensic ID degree will result in "an incredible of options" for employment, Cook said.

"I could go strictly law enforcement, I could be a latent fingerprint examiner for the FBI, I could be a regular FBI field agent, I could go to work for a state police department, or I could go into private security work. That's one of the great things about this program: I don't like choosing."

WVU's program also involves an internship at a federal facility-either the new FBI lab in Quantico, Va., or the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg, just 40 miles from campus. Field work also will be available in the banking and securities industries, as well as with law enforcement.

Freshmen and sophomores must go through preliminary courses before they are admitted to the forensic ID program as juniors. And even passing the courses isn't enough. Students will be subjected to repeated testing, personality assessments, and interviews with law enforcement officials and psychologists.

"Character is important. If some-one is creating a new security system for a nuclear facility, their credentials must be impeccable," Yura said.

Students also must be drug-free. One experiment is enough to ruin a career, because many employers require polygraphs and drug testing. Students in other majors may dabble in drugs during their four years, but "if our people do it, they have just committed professional suicide," Yura said.

WVU will rely on the preliminary courses, including virtual reality sessions, to weed out students who don't belong in the program. At a kiosk called the ImmersaDesk, developed by Pyramid Systems Inc., students don goggles and use a modified joystick to walk through scenarios played out on a four by five-foot angled screen. Instructors watch to see how students conduct themselves at a crime scene and determine whether students can handle what they see.

Henry Lee, longtime director of the Connecticut State Police forensics lab and now that state's commissioner of public safety, is helping WVU develop some of the scenarios and consulting on other exercises.

"It looks like an excellent program," Lee said. Although the nation has a variety of forensic science programs covering everything from entomology to accounting, "ID work somehow was overlooked," he said. "Identification is the most basic and most important area in making linkage between a crime and a suspect," he said. "This traditionally has been learned through apprenticeship. Most ID officers learn by doing."

Michael Kirkpatrick, FBI section chief for the resources management section in Clarksburg, said WVU's program will help law enforcement throughout the country. "Technology is going ahead so fast these days that the kind of course work
. . . individuals in this program will be exposed to will help them keep current with existing technology and give them a foundation they can grow with," he said.

Internships with the FBI will be hands-on training in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, he said.

"Anything we would have somebody do would be a hands-on, learning type situation," Kirkpatrick said. "We're not going to have people just sitting here watching someone else doing the work."

BIOMETRICS High-Tech Crime Prevention A thumb pressed against a microchip could be enough to get inside a nuclear power plant, an oil refinery, or a top-secret government building. Stephanie Caswell Shuckers is looking for a way to tell whether that thumb is real. The WVU researcher is experimenting with microelectronics, human physiology, and traditional medical equipment on a project that dovetails with WVU's new forensic identification program. The field is called biometrics, the use of scanning and analysis techniques to verify a person's identity through unique physical characteristics or personal traits that cannot be stolen or copied. Physiological biometrics rely on such things as the shape of the face, the eye, the finger, the palm, hand geometry, or thermal images. Behavioral biometrics center on such things as voiceprints, handwriting signatures, and keystroke dynamics. Biometrics experts are generally those who focus on preventing a crime, not solving it. A terrorist probably wouldn't hesitate to cut off somebody's finger to gain access to a secure building, Caswell Shuckers said. That finger could be used to make a plastic mold or it could be pressed cold against the monitor. "We need a way to tell if it's a spoof," she said. Caswell Shuckers, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is trying to incorporate electrocardiograms and other devices into biometrics, strapping electrodes on a subject and recording information for later comparison. "Where there's a technology, there's someone who will try to figure a way to get around it," said Professor Michael Yura, coordinator of the forensic ID program. Caswell Shucker's work, however, has potential applications in public health as well. Theoretically, a patient in a remote area could log on to the Internet and transmit physiological data to a doctor hundreds of miles away without ever leaving the bedroom. Biometric devices are becoming increasingly common. Retinal scans were used at the Olympic Village in Atlanta to keep out those who didn't need to be there. And many believe the technology may someday be used for things like welfare fraud. "The University isn't leading the way in technology; the private sector is," Yura said. "As technology changes, our program will have to be sensitive to those changes to stay on the cutting edge." The forensic ID program has invigorated WVU, inspiring potential partnerships with departments where things rarely change, Yura said. Forensic chemistry classes, for example, could add a valuable dimension to an old major. The School of Dentistry is contemplating a forensic dentistry class to teach people how to identify suspects from bite marks. The School of Social Work is discussing a forensic psychology class focused on the study of the criminal mind. The College of Law may provide instruction on the rules of evidence and will give students pointers on surviving cross-examination. Some schools within the University are now searching for staff with unique qualifications, Yura said. The medical school has hired a forensic psychiatrist in the Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry. And many ongoing research projects complement the new degree program, as well. Dr. Tim Tracy of the School of Parmacy has an FBI grant to research ways to identify chemicals in embalmed corpses. Associate Professor Hany Ammar, of the College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, focuses on software engineering applications and algorithms that can be used to examine fingerprints and either match them or eliminate them. "Fingerprints are the most viable biometric in use," Ammar said. "Things in the face could change by the year. But this stays exactly the same." And examining them is cheaper than testing DNA, he said. Assistant Professor Bojan Cukic, also of CEMR, is working on three-dimensional image reconstruction from skeletal remains. "Currently, facial reconstruction is a time-consuming process that relies on the expertise and intuition of the individual artist," Cukic said. The artist pats pieces of clay around pegs and onto a skull model. Reliability is mixed; the finished product may not be enough to make a positive ID, Cukic said. "Computer-based methods are better and more cost efficient, but generate images that are mechanical and lack the lifelike qualities of artistic reconstruction," he said. Cukic is trying to develop new methods that can produce more reaic and accurate faces, with the ability to vary appearance based on age, sex, and ethnic origin. —Vicki Smith

WVU Research in Brief Resetting Biological Clocks A WVU researcher's experiments with fruit flies could provide clues to correcting sleep disorders that are common among the elderly—and among shift workers. Jeffrey L. Price, assistant professor of biology in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, is raising mutant fruit flies with abnormal activity-rest cycles to determine how to reset their biological clocks. "What I'm trying to do is discover molecules, specifically proteins, required to establish a biological clock," says Price, whose published work on the research was cited in the on-line version of the journal Science. Biological clocks are the internal, physiological time-keeping systems present in all organisms. These clocks control circadian rhythms, cyclical variations in activities, and behaviors over each 24-hour period. Melting Highway Ice WVU researchers have found that road salt mixed with a natural saltwater, or brine, can melt snow and ice from highways more quickly than salt alone. The right blend of brine from oil and natural gas wells makes road salt more effective by adding moisture necessary for de-icing roads, says Ron Eck, a civil and environmental engineering professor in the College of Engineering and Mineral Resources. "It takes some time for dry salt to accumulate moisture on snow and ice," Eck says. "When an appropriate brine is applied to the salt, it already has moisture when it hits the road. Then it can start acting immediately because the moisture is already there." Studying New Jersey Smog WVU researchers in the College of Engineering and Mineral Resources have been selected to study smog emissions in New Jersey over the next two years. The research team has received grants to design a suitcase-sized emissions recorder for heavy-duty diesel engines and to help the state of New Jersey measure diesel engine emissions. —Jim Davis WVU Program Goes Global Michael T. Yura, director of WVU's forensic identification degree program, gave a presentation on the program at a United Nations meeting on law enforcement in May. Provost Gerald Lang accompanied Yura to Vienna, Austria, for the meeting. Members of the WVU delegation also attended a meeting at the International Law Enforcement Academy in Budapest, Hungary. The academy trains international law enforcement officials on a variety of topics related to crime prevention.

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