FIRN Student Event: The First London & South East Regional Conference

University of Westminster 2010

One of the activities of the Forensic Institute Research Network is a series of Regional Student Conferences. These events are designed to encourage and enable links between universities, researchers, and students in the same local area. It is also a great showcase for student projects. We are delighted to publicise any student projects and encourage you to visit here often to see how the content of this area increases.

University of Westminster hosted 1^st London and South East Forensic Student Conference on 24 March. More than sixty people from across the UK attended. The day started with a fascinating talk by Dr Martin Hall from the Natural History Museum entitled “Fly on the Wall: the role of insect evidence in criminal investigations” followed by a morning of student talks. Lunch provided a great networking opportunity including the poster session. The afternoon started with a Keynote presentation by Dr Angray Kang (University of Westminster) detailing his work with anthrax, a current bioterrorism issue and then further student presentations.

We had abstracts and talks from students in a wide range of Forensic related disciplines ranging from DNA storage to forensic computing to fingerprint imaging to forensic psychology and interviewing witnesses. The talks were selected from student abstracts and were of a very high standard, each speaker had carefully introduced their subject to make it accessible to those from a different forensic background. In addition to the excellent talks, there were some very interesting posters in total 19 abstracts were submitted.

We are grateful to Wiley and Elsevier for supplying us with prizes to award to the students. The Forensic Institute Travel Bursary was awarded to Amoret Whitaker from the Natural History Museum and Kings College London to present her work at the FORREST conference in Coventry in June.

Dr Caroline Smith, School of Life Sciences, University of Westminster

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