The Recovery Innovation Technology Summit (RITS)

THE INAUGURAL
RECOVERY INNOVATION TECHNOLOGY SUMMIT (RITS 2023)
WAS A HUGE SUCCESS.

The summit, organized and hosted by the UW MIA Recovery and Identification Project, brought together a diverse assembly of academics, independent scholars, and non-profit recovery and identification groups devoted to researching cold cases and innovating technologies that contribute to the recovery of our missing. It was aimed at creating a networking opportunity for interdisciplinary groups and scholars who do similar work and welcomed participants from the both researchers and individuals who focus on the recovery of missing individuals.

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THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS

Grateful to have the support of our sponsors

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Dr. Sarah Wagner, Keynote Speaker 

Sarah Wagner is a Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University. She is the author of To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing (2008) and What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War (2019), winner of the 2020 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing. She is also co-author of Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (2014) and co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death (forthcoming). Funded by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, her research focuses on post-conflict societies, memory, forensic science applied in the wake of war, and, most recently, on COVID-19 death and mourning. In addition to her scholarly publications, she has written opinion editorials and blog posts for the Washington Post, The Hill, Baltimore Sun, and LA Times.

Additional Presenters and Panel Members

Ella Axelrod | Department of Anthropology, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
William Belcher, Ph.D. | School Of Global Integrative Studies, Department Of Anthropology, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln
Michael Darter, Ph.D. | Emeritus Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Renee Davis | Directorate of History and Heritage, Canada’s Casualty Identification Program
Janet Cady | Bioinformatics, Parabon NanoLabs, Inc.
William J. Horton | Special Agent, Murdered and Missing Unit, Bureau of Indian Affairs
Gregg Jamison, Ph.D. | Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Waukesha
Alicia Lawson | Department of Anthropology, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Alan Lee |Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sarah Lockyer, Ph.D. | Casualty Identification Coordinator, Directorate of History and Heritage, Canada’s Casualty Identification Program
Andrew Pietruszka, Ph.D. | Underwater Archaeologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography-University of California, San Diego