Missouri Emergency Response Identification Team

This course will provide a general introduction to the practice of Forensic Anthropology in the medico-legal setting. It will begin with a general overview of what forensic Anthropologists do, their training and certification, discuss how we can help law enforcement agencies with the recovery and identification of burned, buried, skeletal, fragmentary, decomposed and scattered human remains.

The session will continue with a review of human osteology and a virtual quiz component where participants will get to test their osteology knowledge, making the determination if items are human, non-human, or non-osseous. There will also be a brief session of establishing forensic context of human remains, complete with a virtual quiz where participants can assess remains for forensic context.

The session will continue with an overview of how Forensic Anthropologists develop a biological profile from human skeletal remains. The biological profile consists of the age, sex ancestry and stature estimations. The course will conclude with the assessment of trauma from skeletal remains and how to differentiate that from postmortem taphonomy. Case examples will be used throughout the program. 

Course Objectives:

• Learn about the training and certification of forensic anthropologists
• Differentiate between human and non-human skeletal remains
• Describe how forensic anthropologists develop a biological profile from human remains, including which skeletal elements are used for each segment of the biological profile
• Differentiate between osseous trauma and postmortem taphonomy

MariaTeresa A. Tersigni-Tarrant, PhD received her Bachelor’s in Microbiology and Anthropology from Michigan State University in 2000. She attended graduate school at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she received her Masters of Arts Degree in Physical Anthropology in 2002. She continued to pursue her doctorate at The University of Tennessee, with a dissertation entitled Serial Long Bone Histology: Inter and Intra Bone Age Estimation. Dr. Tersigni-Tarrant received her Doctorate in 2005. She was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship in 2005 working at the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command on Hickam AFB, Hawaii. During this fellowship, she was instrumental in establishing standard operating procedures for the histological analysis of human remains for the purpose of identifying missing armed-service members.  

Dr. Tersigni-Tarrant is board certified Forensic Anthropologist and currently serves in a dual role as the Chief Death investigator and Forensic Anthropologist for the St. Louis City Medical Examiner’s Office in St. Louis, Mo. She is retained as an expert outside consultant for the Department of Defense’s DPAA, as well as, serving as contract consultant for various other medicolegal entities in Missouri and Georgia. She was elected President of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology in 2019, a position which she continues to maintain. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, where she serves as the Co-Director of Forensic Education. She runs the Advanced and Basic Medicolegal Death Investigation Courses at SLUSOM and is the Course Director for the Autopsy Requirement for the Second Year Medical Students. Her research interests include bone biology; human and non-human histology, child and elder abuse: patterned fractures and timing of healing, human decomposition research, bone pathology and developmental anatomy.