Dr. Jennifer Cihlar is an Assistant Professor in the Microbiology, Immunology, and Genetics Department at UNTHSC and a member of the UNTHSC Center for Human Identification’s Research Unit where her efforts focus on improving the forensic community’s ability to identity humans associated with crime, missing persons, and human and wildlife trafficking victims through forensic genomic research. With these goals in mind, Jennifer’s current research efforts include development of molecular biology technologies, optimization of SOPs for massively parallel sequencing and Rapid DNA technologies, bioinformatic assessment of the performance and noise in mitochondrial genome analyses that can help guide thresholding strategies for forensic laboratories, identification of novel genetic markers for human and wildlife identification, and investigation into the use of portable genetic technologies to aid law enforcement efforts in curtailing wildlife trafficking.