Resources

Cognitive science has already been integrated with several other high-risk fields such as medicine, air traffic control, and nuclear power. But a series of failures within the forensic community—many of which came into view with the advent of DNA profiling—have now demonstrated the need for cognitive research into forensic practices, too.

As a society, we wave off these low conviction rates as cold cases, but often, the victim’s rape kit was never tested in the first place. According to the Joyful Heart Foundation’s “End the Backlog” team, there is a backlog of untested rape kits in the hundreds of thousands that are sitting in police and crime lab storage facilities across the country.

Today, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), which are trained on millions of face images from thousands of people, can recognize faces in highly-variable, low-quality images. But modern facial forensics won’t become an equitable and acceptable practice until the tech, and the people behind the tech, acknowledge their shortcomings head-on.

The hardware and skills of the digital forensics discipline are constantly evolving, requiring vigilant upkeep. As a result, many public sector laboratories are overburdened, and it’s creating a serious backlog. The private sector may have the answer.

There are various online master’s programs available in criminal justice which do not require GRE scores for admission. The Graduate Record Examination is a computerized test that many graduate schools in the US require students to take. The aim of the exam is to measure students’ verbal, critical thinking, and writing skills.

If you have an undergraduate degree in criminology, psychology, sociology, or history under your belt and you’re exploring your options for higher education, you might consider pursuing a master’s degree in criminal justice. While many people today are interested in careers preventing crime, thanks to the many TV dramas and surging popularity of true crime podcasts, there is still plenty of room for entrants into this fascinating field.

Forensic psychology focuses on the intersection of the justice system and the understanding of the mind. While there is a large interest in careers within this arena of the psych community, some are deterred from pursuing it as a career because of what it takes to gain the required master’s degree in forensic psychology.

The field of nuclear forensics requires extensive scientific knowledge, including familiarity with various nuclear and radiation processes, as well as some degree of investigative skill. Duties might require going into the field to measure isotopes, searching for other traces, and then spending time in the lab analyzing information and comparing data to other known nuclear signatures.