Best Paper Award Recipients

 

 

Best Paper Award Journal Club

ANZPAA NIFS is pleased to present this online forum series showcasing outstanding research and innovation by ANZPAA NIFS Best Paper Award winners.

The first club featured Dr Courtney Lynch and Professor James Curran presenting on the 2024 Best Paper - Capability Enhancement and Innovation: Developing an interpretation model for body fluid identification.

Journal Club Q&A
Given that we can’t guarantee 100% pure biological liquids and the model may be wrong or the sample truly mixed, how will your mixture modeling quantify component proportions (e.g., 95% menstrual blood and 5% peripheral blood), and by what method will you establish ground truth for validation?
In reality we often don’t know whether a sample is truly single-source or whether there’s a small contribution from another fluid (a bit of blood in a saliva or vaginal sample, for example), and in many cases, we never will know the ground truth. In our own studies, (including the mixture modelling paper), we try to minimise this by asking participants to collect samples with gloves, abstaining from intercourse for 7 days etc but that doesn’t guarantee 'purity'. Arguably that variation should be captured in the model so it is trained on.
That’s why we use probabilistic approaches rather than hard classification. The goal might be to ask whether the data are more likely under a single-fluid explanation or a mixed-fluid explanation. We could generate synthetic mixtures where you know the proportions and train a model on that, but they’re not usually representative of real samples. Quantitative methods like qPCR should, in theory, help with mixture proportions, but in practice we may not always get to precise proportions. This is what we’re aiming to better understand in the next steps of this research.

Winners 2025

JOINT WINNER: Best Paper - Forensic Fundamentals (Illicit Drugs)

JOINT WINNER: Best Paper - Forensic Fundamentals (Biology)

    WINNER: Best Paper - Capability Enhancement and Innovation

    WINNER: Best Technical Article, Note or Case Study

    COMMENDATION: Best Technical Article, Note or Case Study

    WINNER: Best Literature Review or Opinion Article

    COMMENDATION: Best Literature Review or Opinion Article

    WINNER: Best New Publisher in a Refereed Journal

    WINNER: Best Paper - Quality and Management

    List of Submissions 2025

    Previous Award Recipients

    Previous recipients of the NIFS Best Paper Awards can be downloaded here and are also be found in NIFS quarterly newsletter.