Identification of Human Remains for Forensic and Humanitarian Purposes: From Molecular to Physical Methods, Volume II

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue, entitled “Identification of Human Remains for Forensic and Humanitarian Purposes: From Molecular to Physical Methods, Volume II”, is the second volume of the Special Issue “Identification of Human Remains for Forensic and Humanitarian Purposes: From Molecular to Physical Methods”, which has published TEN papers.

The identification of human remains, that is, the ability to allocate a name to an unidentified person, is an important part of a wider and complex multidisciplinary process and a crucial step in contributing to the proper and healthy functioning of a civil society and justice. The process of identifying a person in forensic and humanitarian contexts (for example, in disaster victim identification (DVI) and missing persons identification (MPI) scenarios) does not just represent a legal necessity/duty, but also a fundamental right of all individuals and their families; this is for administrative, criminal, civil and ethical reasons, and in order to avoid the flail of ambiguous loss for relatives seeking their loved ones. The identification process involves a comparison of information of various kinds provided by someone (a family member, a colleague, a friend) who knows the person (antemortem data) with the scientific information obtained by a range of forensic experts during the examination and study of human remains (postmortem data). Over the past twenty years, we have seen the development of novel technologies in diverse scientific fields, as well as improvements in existing ones that have allowed us to obtain results that until recently were not technically feasible and affordable.

This Special Issue aims to investigate recent advances in the identification of human remains. It focuses on collecting reviews and original contributions that consider the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to supporting the identification phases of human remains, as well as innovative methodological aspects, bioinformatics and statistical tools, and future prospects of forensic/humanitarian research.

Prof. Dr. Elena Pilli
Prof. Dr. Cristina Cattaneo
Guest Editors

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• skeletal remains
• missing persons
• identification process
• DNA analysis
• forensic anthropology
• forensic odontology
• human rights