ATI Instructors
Dr. Samuel Wasser
ATI Instructor
Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Forensic Science at the University of Washington, and a pioneer of DNA-based wildlife crime forensics.
Background
Dr. Samuel Wasser holds the endowed chair in Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, where he is a Professor in the Department of Biology and Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Forensic Science.
He is recognised worldwide for developing non-invasive tools for monitoring human impacts on wildlife. His laboratory developed tests that identify major elephant poaching hotspots across Africa by extracting DNA from tusks in large ivory seizures and comparing it against a continent-wide DNA reference map.
Those genetic tools were extended to link major ivory traffickers to multiple shipments by matching tusks from the same elephant or close relatives found in separate consignments passing through a common port.
He taught DNA tracing and the linking of multiple seizures to a single trafficker across the training series, including the controlled delivery courses of 2023.