Wednesday Nite at the Lab

press release: WN@TL goes hybrid both with Zoom and with in-person (Room 1111) presentations. The zoom registration link is still go.wisc.edu/240r59. You can also watch a live web stream at on YouTube.

On March 15 Alan Lee of Anthropology will reprise and expand on his recent talk to the Recovery Innovation Technology Summit at the Biotech Center Feb 22-24.  He’ll roll out how he uses computer analysis and machine learning applied to dental records to speed the identification of remains of MIAs.

Description:  The MIA Recovery & Identification Project’s Dental Project is our effort here at the Biotech Center to use computer algorithms to speed up the research process that eventually leads to the identification of unknown persons from WWII. Currently in US custody there are 8,600 Unknown Bodies (X-Files) from WWII that have yet to be identified.

Trying to identify a single person requires a tremendous amount of labor on behalf of the researcher who has to individually comb through dozens if not hundreds of missing person files (IDPFs) in order to make a probable match that can lead to a disinterment request. We intend to speed up that process.

The gist of how this Dental Project works is that dental records are used as the forensic fingerprint to create a tier list of probable matches between X-Files (unknown bodies) and IDPFs (Missing Service Members). We use the computer to rapidly do our comparisons for us once we have digitized the data.

Bio:  I am a graduate student and PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UW-Madison. My scholastic interests are metal-working, blacksmithing, and iron smelting in South Asia! I come from a chemistry background with a Chemistry Master’s from UW-Madison in materials chemistry, and I am now a dissertator in the UW-Madison Department of Anthropology.

My PhD advisor is none other than Dr. J. Mark Kenoyer, a world-renowned archaeologist of South Asia. Check out the website for the famous site Harappa that he excavated for decades.

I am also a member of the UW-MIARIP team out of the Biotechnology Center. Their mission is to find and repatriate the remains of MIA soldiers back to the United States

nk.