Abstract The Transportation Security Laboratory of the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate is tasked with establishing quality control metrics for assessing the performance of x-ray imaging technologies used by airport security. In conformity with that mission, a high-energy x-ray diffraction apparatus was constructed to characterize the xray... MORE

Abstract Microarray processing, which interrogates hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the human genome, has recently gained traction in forensics due to its use in forensic genetic genealogy, which is based on analysis using SNPs to compare distant relatives in publicly curated databases for the purposes of... MORE

Abstract Background: Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based kinship analysis is now a cornerstone of modern forensic genomics. Imputation can be used to augment genome-wide SNP data from low-coverage whole-genome sequencing (LCWGS). The impact of imputation after LCWGS on genotyping error and its subsequent impact on kinship analysis are unknown. Methods: We assessed the... MORE

Abstract The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Exposure Assessment Tool (CEAT) allows users to compare respiratory relative risk to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) for various scenarios, providing understanding of how combinations of protective measures affect risk. CEAT incorporates mechanistic, stochastic, and epidemiological factors including the (i) emission rate... MORE

Abstract Technological advances in sequencing and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping microarray technology have facilitated advances in forensic analysis beyond short tandem repeat (STR) profiling, enabling the identification of unknown DNA samples and distant relationships. Forensic genetic genealogy (FGG) has facilitated the identification of distant relatives of both unidentified remains... MORE

Abstract: Real-time forecasting of disease outbreaks requires standardized outputs generated in a timely manner. Development of pipelines to automate infectious disease forecasts can ensure that parameterization and software dependencies are common to any execution of the forecasting code. Here we present our implementation of an automated cloud computing pipeline to... MORE