UF distance education graduates identify missing persons in their homeland

Arijana Pozder and Ana Milos tackled graduate school with a vengeance. The Bosnian students took an average of three University of Florida online graduate courses per semester while working full time in a forensic lab for the International Commission on Missing Persons in Sarajevo to increase their knowledge of DNA analysis.

The ICMP, an intergovernmental organization, was created in 1996 to investigate 30,000 missing persons cases resulting from the 1991-95 conflicts in the Eastern European countries of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro.

The two friends, who had bachelor's degrees in biology and biochemistry, had been looking for a relevant way to advance their education and their search brought them to UF.

"We were gaining so much valuable experience in the lab, but we felt that we wanted more education in the DNA area to further our skills," Pozder said.

Milos added, "When we found the UF master's in forensic DNA and serology taught completely online, we couldn't believe it. This was the perfect solution to getting the education we wanted."

The women discovered that the UF program included forensic medicine courses from the University of Edinburgh. The professors from both universities had knowledge and experience with forensic DNA analysis that would be very helpful to their work, Pozder said.

Forensic DNA analysis was first used in Great Britain in 1985. The method, developed by British researcher Sir Alec Jeffries, was used in a landmark case to identify a serial killer in the murder of two British schoolgirls.

Donna Wielbo, Ph.D., now an associate professor in the College of Pharmacy who directs the UF Forensic DNA and Serology master's program, worked in the same forensic laboratory handling that case. Until then, blood typing was only used to eliminate suspects in a crime, but it could not prove guilt, Wielbo said. In the British case, the laboratory used blood typing to narrow the list of suspects, and then applied Jeffries' DNA analysis technique to identify the perpetrator, she said.

"There is no doubt that DNA analysis is the identification technique that revolutionized the field of forensic biology," Wielbo said.

Extracting DNA samples from bones, which is more difficult than from blood samples, is a current research focus of international scientists associated with the ICMP. They hope to publish improved techniques that will benefit scientists everywhere, Milos said.

Since it began using DNA as the first step in identifying human remains in November 2001, the ICMP has matched more than 8,500 human remains - often found in mass graves - to surviving family members logged in its DNA database. To continue to expand its genetic database, the commission is sending forensic teams in early December to 12 U.S. cities, including Atlanta and Jacksonville, Fla., to collect blood samples from family members of people missing during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.

The Bosnian students, who discovered the UF distance learning site www.forensicscience.ufl.edu by searching online, are now featured on the UF Web site along with students from Alaska, New Mexico, the Florida Keys, Okinawa and Ireland. They traveled to UF in November for three days of written and oral final exams, and met, for the first time, 13 of their virtual classmates. All the students will receive master's degrees from UF's College of Pharmacy with a concentration in Forensic DNA and Serology.

The women are putting their new UF degrees to immediate use in answering some of their country's most pressing questions and helping to bring closure to a terrible chapter in its recent history.

When war broke out in 1992, the friends were eighth-grade classmates. Their families suffered extreme hardships to survive. Milos' family fled to Canada, but Pozder's family, unable to leave Sarajevo, faced four long, harsh war winters. Separated for nine years, they met again in 2001 at the ICMP, where they were each applying for work in the forensic lab.

"We consider ourselves incredibly lucky to have survived, along with our families, the most horrible period in the history of our country," Milos said. "Because of this we are incredibly sensitive to the importance of our mission and helping identify the vast number of missing persons."