STRmix Team Will Present at Largest Annual Meeting of World’s Forensic Community

Presentations Focus on Interpreting iiSNPs, Visualizing Sequencing Artifacts in NGS Data

The 76^th Annual Conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) – the largest annual meeting of the world’s forensic science community – will feature two presentations by members of the STRmix team.

The STRmix presentations which are scheduled to be held during AAFS 2024 will focus on two key forensic topics:

• As part of the Probabilistic Genotyping Session, STRmix Scientist Developer Dr. Kevin Cheng will discuss “Beyond STRs: A Snippet into the Challenges of Interpreting iiSNPs” on Friday, February 23 at 11:30 a.m. The presentation will examine the behavior of iiSNPs in forensic DNA profiles. Additionally, it will present the results from the interpretation of 26 single-source profiles and 25 two-person mixtures using the probabilistic genotyping solution STRmix™ NGS; and
• As part of the Next-Generation Sequencing Criminalistics Session, STRmix Analyst Developer Dr. Yao-Yuan Liu will discuss “Visualizing Sequencing Artifacts in ForenSeq™ NGS Data” on Friday, February 23 at 2:15 p.m. This presentation will investigate the appearance of high-read noise sequences in NGS data and offer insights into their nature and detection.

AAFS 2024 will be held from February 19-24 at the Denver Convention Center in Denver, CO. This year’s conference – which will feature more than 1,000 scientific papers, workshops, seminars, and poster sessions on topics ranging from accreditation to new drug analytes to medicolegal death investigation – is expected to attract attendees from all 50 U.S. states and more than 70 other countries.

The theme of this year’s AAFS conference is “Justice for All,” which will be highlighted in the keynote address by internationally acclaimed social justice and human rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative. The keynote will be delivered at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, February 21.

Kevin Cheng, PhD. joined the Institute of Environmental Science and Research Limited (ESR) New Zealand in 2017 as a Data Analyst and has served as Scientist Developer since 2018. A graduate of the University of Melbourne who received his doctoral degree in statistics at the University of Auckland, Dr. Cheng is the co-author of numerous scientific papers, including “A Diagnosis of the Primary Difference between EuroForMix and STRmix™” and “Developmental Validation of STRmix™ NGS, a Probabilistic Genotyping Tool for the Interpretation of Autosomal STRs from Forensic Profiles Generated Using NGS.” 

Yao-Yuan Liu, PhD. works on bioinformatic processing of forensic NGS DNA data as an Analyst Developer at ESR. Co-author of various scientific papers, including “Forensic STR Allele Extraction Using a Machine Learning Paradigm” and “Estimation of Population Specific Values of Theta for Sequence-Based STR Profiles,” Dr. Liu received both his doctoral and master’s degrees in forensic science from the University of Auckland.

For more information about the 76^th Annual Conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, visit https://www.aafs.org(external link).