Members of Kenan Collaboratory team attend U.S. Department of Justice working group

Representatives of the Science, Ethics, Identity and Human Rights (SEIHR) Kenan Creative Collaboratory, facilitated by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, will be joining a working group meeting of the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) Missing Migrant Working Group in mid-March. The Office of Justice Program’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funds major efforts to maximize the use of DNA technology in our criminal justice system. Much of NIJ’s work has focused on developing tools to investigate and solve the cases of missing persons and unidentified decedents.

The Science, Ethics, Identity and Human Rights (SEIHR) Kenan Creative Collaboratory synergizes scholars, researchers and students in the sciences and humanities to examine a key challenge in the world: the ethical application of scientific technologies for human identification in human rights contexts. The team examines ethically sound processes for human identification in high-risk populations that maximize the investigative utility and minimize risk of privacy violation. It is one of three teams this academic year that are fostered by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and funded by the William R. Kenan, Jr. Funds.