Teaching Forensic Entomology, Forensic Anthropology, and Haematology & Serology during the COVID-19 pandemic: Practical activities for distance learning.

As the COVID-19 pandemic upended college and university instruction throughout the world, instructors were hard-pressed to find suitable alternatives for practical activities typically carried out outside of classrooms-in laboratories, workshops, clinics, and in the field. In response to this unanticipated challenge, they relied on their ingenuity to achieve pre-pandemic goals under pandemic conditions that necessitated the shift to online teaching. The Forensic Science Undergraduate Program housed in the School of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico was not exempt from this educational upheaval but, due to its interdisciplinary nature, required creating and/or adopting a wide range of activities capable of training students to perform practical tasks associated with subject areas that span the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and the law.

Development of an instrument for assessing the quality of forensic evidence and expert testimony from three feature-comparison methods: DNA, voice, and fingerprint analysis.

In a context of rising violence and long-lasting impunity, in 2008, Mexico's criminal justice system underwent a radical change from an inquisitorial model to an adversarial one, to make it more effective, transparent, and expeditious. The new system tasked judges with publicly determining the admissibility of forensic evidence, as well as assessing its technical quality and probative value-tasks for which they currently receive little to no training. With the aim of contributing to the consolidation of the adversarial model, a comparative framework-in the form of a checklist-of the analysis of fingerprints, DNA samples, and voice recordings was created.