Written based upon a podcast shared on Crime and the Courtroom

The forensic DNA field is not developing leadership candidates as quickly as it's creating leadership vacancies. If the people coming into the field don't see leaders they want to emulate, or don't see a path from analyst to supervisor that looks survivable, the pipeline thins. Succession planning doesn't start when someone hands in a resignation. It starts with whether the next generation believes leading is worth doing.

Pam Marshall directs the Forensic Science and Law Program at Duquesne University and works with students who have already decided they want to do this work. She serves on the ISHI Advisory Committee and thinks carefully about how to make the conference more accessible and beneficial for students attending for the first time. What she observes is that students in forensic DNA programs are paying attention to more than the science. They watch the people who have been doing this work for twenty years and read the signals: whether those people seem like they chose leadership, or stumbled into it and never quite recovered. Those observations shape whether promising scientists eventually see leadership as something worth pursuing, or something to route around.

What lab directors signal through how they carry the role matters more than most of them realize. Mentorship doesn't require a program or a title. It requires showing up and taking the relationship seriously. And it starts long before a vacancy exists.

Forensic scientists don't just develop technical skills at the bench. Over years of casework, they develop something harder to name: a sense of professional self that is bound up in the work itself. The precision required for DNA analysis, the weight of knowing that results will be tested in court, the satisfaction of an interpretation that holds up under scrutiny. These become part of who you are. When promotion pulls you away from that work and puts you in a supervisory role, the technical skills that defined you are suddenly beside the point. The new job calls for something different, and most scientists have had no training in what that something is.

Julie Sikorsky spent ten years at the bench before her supervisor informed her that one of the analysts was going to take over running the laboratory. She remembers what the moment felt like. She remembers asking herself, if not me, who. She decided to put her name forward. What followed was a year of conflict, both internal and external, as she tried to reconcile the leader she thought she should be with the analyst she still was.

"Being in a management role has really transformed me as an individual, mainly because my focus then became learning more about myself so I could more effectively manage others. And then things kind of slotted into place, but I had to be willing to kind of let go of what I thought I should be, and try to open my mind to what I should be and not be afraid of making mistakes along the way and being vulnerable with that."

— Julie Sikorsky, Forensic Leadership Alliance

What Julie describes is not a failure of preparation. It is the predictable consequence of a field that selects people for leadership based on technical excellence and then offers them little support in making the shift. The assumption, often unspoken, is that competence in analysis translates to competence in management. It doesn't. The skills are adjacent at best and sometimes actively in tension. Strong analysts are trained to minimize variability, to control outcomes, to verify their own work. Strong managers have to let people make mistakes, tolerate uncertainty, and accept that they can no longer personally verify everything.

John Collins coaches forensic professionals navigating exactly these transitions. He works with people at the moment the new role stops feeling like an extension of the old one and starts feeling like a completely different job, because that is what it is. The framing he offers is direct and doesn't soften the reality:

"You're changing professions. You're not just going into another office. You are going into management."

— John Collins, Forensic Leadership Alliance

The distinction matters because how you understand the transition shapes how you approach it. Leaders who treat a promotion as a lateral move (same field, different desk) tend to struggle in predictable ways. They hold on too long to the work they know. They over-supervise because letting go feels like losing control. They feel fraudulent in the management role and restless without the bench, and neither feeling gets named or worked through because no one told them it was coming.

John has observed that the moment a leader understands they have entered a new profession is often the moment they stop fighting the transition and start actually developing in the role. That reframe doesn't come automatically. It usually requires someone outside the situation to name it. Which is precisely what the FLA's coaching sessions at ISHI are designed to do: give leaders a space where the real conversation can happen, with someone who has made the same journey and can offer perspective without an agenda.

The DNA field, as Ray Wickenheiser observes, is heavily populated with type-A professionals. That's not an accident. The work demands it. Precision under pressure, rigorous documentation, zero tolerance for error in a domain where error has consequences for real people. These aren't just preferences, they're professional requirements. The analysts who advance are often the ones who hold the tightest grip on quality and accuracy.

Which makes it worth sitting with the irony: those same qualities can become liabilities in a supervisory role. The instinct to check everything becomes micromanagement. The standard that made you excellent at the bench becomes the bar you hold your team to in a way that leaves them no room to develop. Ray names the tension plainly: how do you let go of something and let people learn and develop, when your entire professional identity has been built around not letting things go unverified?

"There's a real challenge in making that transition, and I think they see it also in people leading them, where there's a real delicate balance between micro management, being involved enough, and checking right out."

— Ray Wickenheiser, Forensic Leadership Alliance

Ray speaks from his own experience of this. He went from senior scientist with the RCMP, where he had significant autonomy on cases, directly to lab director of the New York State Police system, with three weeks of overlap with the outgoing director and no supervisory experience between the two roles. He had naively assumed he would keep doing casework alongside the leadership responsibilities. He didn't. But the three weeks of transition time, he says, were a godsend. Enough to get his footing, enough to establish a relationship he could call on when things got hard. He wouldn't wish the abrupt transition on anyone. He also wouldn't trade the experience of stepping into an organization without being the person who had grown up in it. Both things are true simultaneously, and that kind of complexity doesn't simplify neatly into advice.

What it does point toward is a case for deliberate preparation. Treating the bench-to-supervisor transition as what it is: an event that warrants planning, mentorship, and a realistic picture of what's ahead. Not to discourage people from stepping forward, but to give them a fighting chance when they do.

The workshop the FLA offered at ISHI 36 was scheduled at the end of the symposium. By the time attendees had spent a week absorbing new ideas and thinking through problems, the impulse to sit down with an experienced leader and talk through something specific was strong. But the week was over. At ISHI 37, with the FLA's full-day workshop on Monday, those coaching conversations will have room to develop across the rest of the conference, seeded by the morning's work and continued in the days that follow.

That structural shift reflects something the FLA has been learning: that single events don't produce durable change. What produces durable change is cadence. Repeated, low-pressure contact with ideas and people that allows new thinking to consolidate over time. The workshop is a start. The coaching sessions are a continuation. The relationships built across a week at ISHI are what actually persist.

The 2026 workshop, which Julie designed, takes succession planning as its organizing question. Not because succession planning is unfamiliar to lab directors, but because most of them know the term and very few have done the work. The uncomfortable truth is that most forensic labs don't plan for succession. They survive it. Transitions are reactive. Vacancies drive decisions. The result is reluctant leaders who weren't ready, teams who weren't prepared, and organizations that repeat the same cycle of disruption every time someone leaves.

The workshop reframes the question. Instead of asking who will fill the next vacancy, it asks what kind of laboratory culture produces leaders who actually want the role. That requires working at three levels simultaneously: the individual leader's identity, the laboratory's culture and reputation, and the pipeline of emerging scientists who are watching both and deciding whether leadership is something they want to pursue.

"We want to build a laboratory where people want to be leaders."

— Julie Sikorsky, Forensic Leadership Alliance

Building that kind of laboratory means making leadership visible and honest. It means showing emerging scientists what the role actually involves, including the parts that are hard, so that the people who step forward are stepping toward something real. It means lab directors and supervisors being willing to be transparent about the pressures they carry, not to discourage anyone, but to invite them in accurately.

It also means that the lab itself has to be the kind of place people want to stay. A laboratory with high turnover, disengaged staff, and a culture of deferred accountability does not produce willing successors. It produces people who are looking for the exit. Succession planning, in the FLA's framing, isn't an HR exercise. It's a reflection of whether the organization has done the work of building something worth leading.