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GHEP Congress 2026 Workshop: Disaster Victim Identification (DVI)

course-mexico2026.Rmd
  • Date: 20th of May, 2026
  • Where: Mexico City, as part of the GHEP-ISFG Meeting 2026
  • Teachers: Magnus D. Vigeland & Lourdes Prieto
  • Languages: English and Spanish
  • Audience: Experts with knowledge of the statistical interpretation of DNA evidence.

Description

DNA-based identification of victims of disasters or conflicts is a complex process, with many challenges. When many victims are involved, the computational burden can grow dramatically due to the large number of genetic comparisons required. The time elapsed since the event can further increase complexity, influencing the quality of post-mortem (PM) samples and reference pedigrees. In addition, the information available about the victims and missing persons may fundamentally affect the identification process, for example whether the scenario is open or closed, and whether victims are related.

Several statistical approaches have been proposed for matching PM and ante-mortem (AM) data in order to generate lists of potential identifications, including one-to-one, PM-driven, AM-driven (1), and joint analysis (2,3). In this workshop, we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of these methods and explore the impact of using different identification strategies.

In the exercises we use freely available software, including the well-established Familias and the newer program DIVIANA based on the pedsuite R packages.

References

  1. D Kling, T Egeland, A Tillmar & L Prieto. Mass Identifications. Statistical Methods in Forensic Genetics. Elsevier, 2021

  2. MD Vigeland, T Egeland. Joint DNA-based disaster victim identification. Scientific Reports, 2021

  3. T Egeland, MD Vigeland. Kinship cases with partially specified hypotheses. FSI Genetics, 2025

Learning outcome

After the workshop, participants will understand possible approaches to mass identification of victims. They will learn the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and how to use appropriate software.

Prerequisites

All participants should bring a laptop on which they have administrative rights

In the course we will use Familias and R. Please make sure these are installed on your computer. We recommend RStudio for running R.

If you run into installation problems, we will help during the workshop. To save time, we encourage you to update both R and any installed packages before the workshop.

Schedule

The following schedule is tentative.

  • 09:00–10:00 Introduction to DVI (LP)
  • 10:00–10:30 Exercises I. (Software: Familias)
  • 10:30–11:00 COFFEE BREAK
  • 11:00–11:45 Statistical tools for kinship and DVI (MDV)
  • 11:45–12:30 Exercises II. (Software: QuickPed)
  • 12:30–13:15 DVI cases with related missing persons (MDV)
  • 13:15–14:00 Exercises III. (Software: DIVIANA)
  • 14:00–16:00 LUNCH
  • 16:00–17:00 Priors and posteriors in DVI cases (LP)

Solutions to the exercises can be requested by email to magnusdv at gmail dot com.