Forensic genealogy is the art of identifying victims or perpetrators by tracing family connections derived from DNA evidence left at the crime scene. But it's not easy; many detectives solving cold cases must work with fragments of human remains decades old that may fail traditional forensic testing. How can you extract and sequence DNA from a rootless hair or a heavily degraded sample? Astrea Forensics, spun out of Ed Green's lab at UC Santa Cruz, can help, using techniques derived from paleogenetics. In this talk, Astrea CEO and co-founder Kelly Harkins Kincaid will explain how her company empowers law enforcement to bring closure to families of victims who once would have remained anonymous using samples long thought to contain no DNA.
Where & When
Zoom Webinar
Thursday, December 9, 2021, 1:00 to 2:00 PM PT
About the Speaker
Kelly Harkins Kincaid has BA, MA, and PhD degrees in anthropology and is currently running two genetics companies: Claret Bioscience and Astrea Forensics. As the PI and CEO, she is involved with the design, validation, and commercialization of NGS tools, whether for application in research and the clinic (ClaretBio), or in law enforcement contexts (Astrea Forensics).
Dr. Kincaid has long been interested in hypotheses about the evolutionary and anthropogenic processes associated with the emergence and persistence of human pathogens and their concomitant diseases. Her doctoral work at Arizona State combined paleopathology, bioarchaeology, and genetics and employed enrichment strategies and short read sequencers to recover and reconstruct the genomes of ancient pathogens infecting once-living humans. She worked primarily on tuberculosis and leishmaniasis in the Americas, with experience in the genomes of plague and syphilis, as well as with non-infectious skeletal pathology. During her postdoctoral fellowship at UC Santa Cruz, she moved into NGS technology development.