# About the Authors1

## Sam Tyner, Ph.D.

Sam is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE) at Iowa State University (ISU). She earned her Ph.D. in Statistics from ISU in 2017. In 2018, she received a fellowship from rOpenSci to create this free book for anyone interested in open source forensic science. For more about Sam, follow her on Twitter or GitHub, and visit her website.

## Heike Hofmann, Ph.D.

Heike is a Professor of Statistics at Iowa State University. She is a member of the CSAFE faculty and a core member of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program at ISU. She is also a faculty member in the Human-Computer Interaction program and is on the ISU Data Science Curriculum Committee. Her primary research interests are data visualization, multivariate categorical data analysis, statistical computing, exploratory data analysis and interactive statistical graphics.

## Soyoung Park, Ph.D.

Soyoung Park is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CSAFE at Iowa State University. She received her Ph.D. in Statistics from ISU in 2018. Her research interests include applied statistics, data science, forensic science, image analysis, and machine learning. Her recent research focuses on pattern matching problems in two-dimensional shoe sole impressions and optimal matching criteria for chemical matching of forensic glass fragments.

## Eric Hare, Ph.D.

Eric is the Chief Data Scientist at Omni Analytics. He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics and Computer Science from Iowa State University in 2017. For his dissertation, Eric assisted in the development of `bulletr`, the precursor to the `x3ptools` and `bulletxtrctr` packages introduced in Chapter @ref(#bullets), and the associated bullet matching models which are a focus of a section of this book.

## Xiao Hui Tai

Xiao Hui is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is currently working on matching problems in forensic science. Previously she was a statistician with the Singapore government.

## Karen Kafadar, Ph.D.

Karen Kafadar is Commonwealth Professor and Chair of Statistics at University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Princeton and has served on several National Academy of Science committees, including the ones that led to the reports Weighing Bullet Lead Evidence (2004), Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward (2009), Evaluating Testing, Costs, and Benefits of Advanced Spectroscopic Portals (2011), and Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification (2014). She also has served on the governing boards for the American Statistical Association (ASA), Institute of Mathematical Statistics, International Statistical Institute, National Institute of Statistical Sciences, Forensic Science Standards Board, and is the 2019 ASA President.

## Karen Pan

Karen Pan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics at University of Virginia working on statistical issues in forensic science relating to fingerprints and glass evidence.

## Amanda Luby

Amanda is currently finishing her Ph.D. in Statistics & Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her dissertation focuses on statistical methods for understanding complex human decision-making, with applications in forensic evidence analysis. She will be an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Swarthmore College beginning August 2019.

1. Information current as of May 20, 2019↩