Pete Mendoza
Photo of Carina Marques, a UTRGV assistant professor of anthropology and School of Integrative Biological and Chemical Sciences.
UTRGV received a $467,325 grant from the National Institute of Justice for a forensic science project aimed to use artificial intelligence to assist in identifying the age at death of a body.
Carina Marques, a UTRGV assistant professor of anthropology and School of Integrative Biological and Chemical Sciences, said anthropologists assist law enforcement agents and forensic pathologists when skeletal remains are recovered.
“One of our roles as a biological anthropologist is to try to identify that person,” Marques said. “We start often by wanting to know the age of the person, sex estimation, high population affinity, which would help us to kind of narrow down the potential matches and figure out who that person was.”
She said as of the moment, the methods used to identify a body do not provide accurate data because people tend to age differently.
Marques said the project will be using the cementum of the tooth to give a more accurate age at death.
“In our tooth, the cementum accumulates yearly like a tree ring,” she said. “The tree rings that you count, rings to know the age of the tree, it’s almost the same.”
She said it is difficult to use this method of identification because of human error. However, the project will use an AI software to precisely obtain the analysis of the cementum.
Interdisciplinary studies graduate student Olga Ibarra-Sanchez said her part of the research will involve the season of death.
“So, the season of death is looking at the outer layer of the cementum in the teeth and that will help kind of create a applicability of dental cementum to estimate whether the season of death was in the fall or winter or in the spring,” Ibarra-Sanchez said.
Experts from other parts of the world will collaborate with UTRGV students, faculty and technicians to ensure the success of the project.
Marques said she is thrilled to be working on such a great project.
“I’m really enthusiastic about developing this area of biological and forensic anthropology here at UTRGV,” Marques said.
For more information on the project, visit The National Institute of Justice website.
This is Pete Mendoza for Vaquero Radio.
