European IABPA Conference 2008 – Zürich, Switzerland

Earlier this month, Kevin and I attended the 2nd European IABPA conference in Zürich, Switzerland.

This conference saw about 140 participants from 23 countries and was quite an interesting one. The main organizers – Sabine Hess and Andreas Schweizer [both of the Wissenschaftlicher Dienst, Zürich, Switzerland] – did a fantastic job of keeping things on track and running smoothly. Silke Brodbeck [Blutspureninstitut, Germany] did a great job organizing the talks.

There were a few interesting talks on crime scene reconstruction, several talks which generated interesting evening discussions, and presentations on the state of bloodstain pattern analysis in France and Canada. The Complex Bloodstain Patterns workshop by Brian Allen [Ontario Police College, Canada] was particularly useful to me as it helped me put our work with HemoSpat into context.

It was great to meet with licensees face-to-face and discuss potential improvements to HemoSpat, and to hear HemoSpat mentioned in several of the talks. We also were fortunate [?] enough to participate as members of the “Vineyard Escape Team” on the night of the banquet. Sadly one member of the team was injured and required surgery to his arm.

After the conference, Kevin and I were fortunate enough to be invited by Martin Eversdijk [Forensic Police Amsterdam-Amstelland, The Netherlands] to tour their new forensics labs in Amsterdam, and by Martin Roos [Netherlands Forensic Institute, The Netherlands] to tour the NFI building in The Hague. These tours were very interesting as we got to see different aspects of forensic services in The Netherlands. [Thanks also to Dennis Boon of the NFI for the tour and to Jos Klemm and Ger Coolen of the Regio Politie Limburg-Zuid for the lift to Maastricht!]

See you in Boulder, Colorado, USA!

Andy Maloney
Lead Developer, HemoSpat