MURFREESBORO — The scientist who helps identify and bring home American
heroes from military conflicts worldwide will speak at MTSU Tuesday, Oct. 29,
in a free public event in the university’s Student Union.
Dr. Tom Holland, an
internationally renowned forensic expert who has led recovery missions to
numerous countries, including North and South Korea, China, Iraq, Kuwait and
Cambodia, is the fall 2013 speaker for MTSU’s William M. Bass Legends in
Forensic Science Lectureship.
He’ll speak on “The
Challenge of Returning America’s War Dead as Viewed through Time, Technology and
Government” beginning at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in the MTSU Student Union’s
second-floor ballroom.
Organizers are
encouraging visitors to park in the South Rutherford Boulevard lot and ride a
Raider Xpress shuttle into campus to the Student Union building. A campus map
is available online at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParkingMap13-14.
MTSU’s Forensic
Institute for Research and Education, or FIRE, is sponsoring Holland’s free
public lecture. The Bass Lecture Series, named for renowned University of
Tennessee forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass, brings respected
forensic-science experts to campus each fall and spring.
Holland is deputy to
the commander of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and the scientific
director of the command’s Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii,
the largest skeletal identification laboratory in the world.
Holland was an
archaeologist and museum curator before beginning his federal service as a
forensic anthropologist with the Central Identification Laboratory in 1992. His
duties include approving the identifications of all U.S. military personnel
from past conflicts, including more than 1,000 soldiers from World War I, World
War II, the Korean War, the Cold War and the Vietnam War, including the Vietnam
Unknown Soldier from Arlington National Cemetery.
Under his leadership,
the Central Identification Laboratory became the first — and to date, only — skeletal
forensic laboratory in the world to be accredited by the American Society of
Crime Laboratory Directors-Laboratory Accreditation Board.
Holland, who is the
author of the Dr. Kel McKelvey crime-fiction series “One Drop of Blood” and
“K.I.A.,” is a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and is one
of fewer than 100 Diplomates of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. He
also is a member of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors and
serves as a forensic consultant to the New York State Police and the
International Committee of the Red Cross in Switzerland.
For more information
on the Oct. 29 lecture, please contact the FIRE offices at 615-494-7713 or
visit http://www.mtsu.edu/fire.
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