News

DeEtta (Dee) Mills, PhD

Professor
Florida International University

Dr. DeEtta (Dee) Mills, left, and Dr. Julian Mendel pictured with their patent. Dr. Mills later utilized the technology in a novel way for a CARFS project.

Why are you excited to work with CARFS?

These seed grants allow us to ‘think outside of the box’ and apply/invent new ideas and technology to solve problems our Industry Advisory Board (IAB) members see in the current approaches in forensic science research. It is the end user that is challenging the academic researchers to innovate and approach research from a new perspective, to sometimes think differently. The IAB funding allows us to instill and infuse creativity in our students and our research and, hopefully, to contribute to the overall societal good.

What is your inspiration?

Innovation! Creativity. Challenging questions that require new approaches to solve. It isn’t always about reinventing the wheel but to think about how technology in one field can be applied to another discipline, in this case, forensic science. Most of the techniques we use have been used for different purposes. It is our challenge to test whether or not we can apply current technology to forensics or do we need to innovate and create better technology to assist in the pursuit of justice.

Research Interests

• Microbiome and Soil Microbiome
• Non-Human DNA Profiling

Capabilities

• Microbiome analyses
• Bioinformatics/classification algorithms
• Non-Human DNA Analysis

Advanced Instrumentation

• Forensic DNA Laboratory Equipment
• FASTPREP
• Quibit
• Quant Studio 3
• FGX-MiSeq
• TF S5
• Minion bioanalyzer