Dr John Buckleton Photo: supplied/ESR
A team of ESR scientists have recently received New Zealand's most valuable science prize for the development of STRmix - scientific software that is used to interpret DNA material from a crime scene that comes from multiple individuals.
Dr John Buckleton, a principal scientist at ESR and one of the world's leading researchers in forensic evidence interpretation, worked with Dr Jo-Anne Bright and Dr Duncan Taylor from Forensic Science South Australia to develop the tool, which was born out of a crisis in 2009 when an Australian laboratory was forced to close after realising it had been incorrectly using software to interpret DNA for case work.
The software has now been used to interpret mixed DNA in more than 100,000 cases worldwide.
