Applying forensic science in environmental analysis

Congratulations to Dr Emma Levin, who was awarded her PhD on 11^th November for work which adapted techniques developed in forensic science to the automated analysis of environmental materials.

Her interdisciplinary project combined forensic science theory and image processing techniques to test automated methods for the analysis of environmental samples, including counting mineral grains and algae cells and developing measurements of their size and shape.

The aim was to investigate whether hypotheses relevant to forensic science, for example, the effects of the size and shape of a particle on its transfer and retention by footwear, could usefully be applied to questions in environmental science.

Emma’s research was supervised by Professor Ruth Morgan (Crime Science) and Professor Viv Jones (Geography), and her examiners were Professor Alastair Ruffell (Queen’s Belfast) and Professor Adam Gibson (UCL Medical Physics).

She has already published two papers from her thesis.

See

• Journal of Forensic Sciences, March 2019
• Science and Justice, September 2017