Written by: Tara Luther, Promega with the assistance of AI

Jo-Anne Bright and Michael Coble open with A Paradyme Shift in Forensic DNA Analysis. Bright, co-developer of STRmix™, and Coble, of the Center for Human Identification at UNT Health Science Center, test a new low-stutter polymerase built into the Paradyme 27GY System. They run it against ground-truth single-source and mixed profiles to see what a cleaner stutter signal actually buys an analyst at interpretation.

Bright returns Thursday with It's Ys, a probabilistic genotyping method built specifically for Y-STR profiles. Most labs still interpret Y-STR data manually. This talk asks what changes when that process gets the same statistical treatment autosomal STRs have had for years.

Coble is back too, with Probabilistic Searching of Databases Compared to Binary CODIS Eligibility. His team ran 155 mixtures against a 25-million-profile database using a fully probabilistic search method, DBLR™. It identified 83.4 percent of true donors, against 37.7 percent under the current CODIS Moderate Match Estimate threshold, and it did that while returning only four non-donor hits.

Single cells get their own session this year in the presentation of The SCAnDi Project. This team isolates individual cells from a six-contributor mixture using fluorescence-activated cell sorting, then compares whole genome amplification methods across two commercial STR kits to see how much profile quality actually survives the process.

Zachary Goecker of NIST and Donald Siegel of the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner present Advances in Forensic Proteomics. Their work uses protein markers to identify body fluids and donors when DNA is degraded or simply not there. A proteomic assay built on this research has been accredited and running in casework at NYC OCME since 2023.

Kevin Lord of Astrea Forensics presents Discover the Hidden Dangers Lurking in Your FIGG SNP Profile. He introduces two tools built to catch technical problems in a SNP profile before they cost an investigation a lead, SNPShake and astrea-sensitivity-test. Behind both sits WOPR, Astrea's sequencing pipeline, validated under ISO 17025 down to 0.1x coverage.

Lisa Grossweiler of the FBI delivers the CODIS and NDIS Update. NDIS now holds more than 26.5 million offender profiles and 1.48 million crime-scene profiles. The program has aided more than 776,000 investigations to date.

Douglas Hares, also of the FBI, follows with the Rapid DNA Update. His talk covers the implementation framework labs need to bring Rapid DNA into CODIS eligibility.

Christopher Asplen introduces the New NCJA Center for Forensic DNA Policy and Practice. It is a $3 million initiative from the National Criminal Justice Association, built around five problems: offender collection gaps, Rapid DNA rollout, uncollected lawfully owed samples, hit follow-up, and governance of forensic genetic genealogy.

Ronaldo Carneiro da Silva Junior of INTERPOL presents DNA Databases: INTERPOL's Strategy and Experience. His talk covers how 196 member countries share DNA profiles, and how the I-Familia database supports kinship searches for missing persons.

Marissa Esterline's Serial Offender or Personnel Contamination is worth reading closely before you get to Providence. Her lab built an internal control database from employee and law enforcement personnel profiles, running on TrueAllele® software. It flagged a crime scene detective's DNA across five unrelated homicide investigations. Once confirmed, that detective was ultimately linked to thirteen cases before retiring. A second employee has since been connected to sixteen more. One profile had already gone into CODIS before the match surfaced and had to come back out.

Mark Perlin's How Courts Decide Reliability walks through United States v. Anderson. In March 2026, the Third Circuit affirmed the admissibility of computer-based probabilistic genotyping under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and Daubert. Perlin breaks the decision down prong by prong: testability, error rate, standards, peer review, general acceptance.

Nicole Novroski is joined by Andrew Lee, Nicholas Santomartino, and Ray Tierney of the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office for From Admissibility to Precedent. The panel examines the Gilgo Beach Frye hearing, where whole genome sequencing, SNP analysis, and rootless hair testing were all found generally accepted in the relevant scientific community.

Tim Kalafut takes the other side of the ledger with The Power of No DNA. His argument: a negative result, DNA that should have been there and wasn't, deserves the same rigor in testimony as a positive association.

Ronaldo Carneiro da Silva Junior of INTERPOL presents DNA Databases: INTERPOL's Strategy and Experience. His talk covers how 196 member countries share DNA profiles, and how the I-Familia database supports kinship searches for missing persons.

Virginia Barron, of Barron Law Office and the Minnesota Board of Public Defense, presents When 'Unsuitable' Obscures 'Absent'. She reviewed two criminal sexual conduct cases in which Y-chromosome quantification testing found no detectable male DNA in the samples tied to the disputed conduct. In both cases, the lab reported the finding as 'not suitable for DNA testing' rather than 'no male DNA detected,' language that became a central issue at trial. Her argument sits right alongside Kalafut's: the words a lab chooses for a negative result carry as much weight as the result itself.

Stacey Baker presents The Wayward Beach Bum. Her case involves remains that washed ashore in south Florida with no missing persons report to check against. STR and SNP testing alone couldn't close it. A genealogy lead's social media activity supplied the final clue.

Karen Ross, founding chief of the Queens District Attorney's Cold Case Unit, presents When Science Speaks for the Dead. Her office built a prosecutor-led model to revisit every unresolved remains case in Queens County using today's forensic standards. It has produced six confirmed identifications so far.

Colleen Fitzpatrick returns to the Lake and Ng investigation five years in, with The Five Year Mark. Her team is working through more than a thousand fragmented, thermally damaged remains. One identification came down to a single small bone fragment and a rare X-inheritance pattern: Wilseyville Jane Doe.

Christine Scott walks through From Tarp to Truth. The Cuyahoga County case started with a 911 call about a mattress on a roadside. Forty-three samples were processed. Twenty-two profiles were suitable for comparison. Eight matched one or more of four suspects, who ultimately pleaded guilty.

Cairenn Binder and Craig Paterson present Breaking the UK Barrier. Their case is the first UK citizen identified through investigative genetic genealogy, resolved through a partnership between two universities on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Kevin McKenna marks the 25th anniversary of September 11th with A Promise Made. His update covers the 21,905 remains and more than 17,000 reference samples tested since 2001, and the 1,100 people still unidentified.

Allison Peacock closes this list of cases nearly 250 years in the other direction, with It Takes a Village. Her case is the identification of Private John Pumphrey, a Revolutionary War soldier named this June after a year of genetic genealogy, YDNA and mtDNA tracing, and archival research most labs never touch.

Wednesday's panel, The Connective Thread, is chaired by Jennifer Degner, a certified sexual assault nurse examiner with nearly two decades in forensic nursing. She's joined by four people who've worked alongside a SANE from four different seats at the table: survivor Ashley Spence, founder of the DNA Justice Project, whose 2003 assault was resolved by a 2010 CODIS match; forensic analyst Megan O'Donnell of the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory Biology Unit; detective Steve Bailey; and prosecutor Ryan Powell (participating in a personal capacity). Together, they're tracing how a SANE's work in the exam room becomes the thread running through everything that happens after.

Raman Sandhu-Kirmer and Kris Cano present When Innovation Meets Reality. Their lab replaced quantification kits, chemistries, and thermocyclers, all validated, all performing to spec. Turnaround times still got longer, because staffing and process weren't ready for what the new systems could do.