September

September has been a busy month. Lots of casework, a conference in Krakow and some R&D-projects. Last week I have been in Krakow at the ENFSI- Forensic IT and the FIDIS workshop. At the ENFSI-FIT conference I was elected as chairman, and we are going to organize another conference in the Netherlands next year. It was a nice conference, and one of the advantages of conferences and presentations is that it will let you focus on presentation of the results on R&D-projects and of course lots of communication with other colleagues. Krakow was also a nice city, however we had to work five days long. The FIDIS workshop also went well (I was chairing that workshop, so I might be somewhat biased).

Next week I have to be recertified as a forensic scientist. Certification was also one of the topics at the conference, and it was brought by the National Center of Forensic Sciences in Orlando. The certification process I have next week, is that I have submitted five reports to the committee together with a form on which is stated that I still fulfill the requirements (education, number of cases and R&D-projects). The committee will ask questions concerning the reports as if it was a court case. Two committee members are not from our lab (e.g. the Forensic Science Service in the UK), and after the hearing they will decide if I can be recertified, or otherwise what other steps have to be taken to be recertified again. This recertification is valid for a period of four years. Now it is an internal process, however the future would be that an external body would do these kind of reviews.