Speakers

Bram Bekaert is a DNA expert witness for the Belgian courts as well as the quality manager for the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium. He holds an associate professorship at the Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Leuven and has co-founded the MSc course Forensic Biomedical Sciences within the Faculty of Medicine. Professor Bekaert is an elected advisor on the DNA Evaluation Committee, the president of the Royal Belgian College of Forensic Medicine and a member of the National Board of Sexual Assault Reference Centres in Belgium. He is the founder of the project Benefit of the Doubt in which students reinvestigate cold cases and potential miscarriages of justice. In collaboration with the Leuven Biomedical Technology Lab, he is a pioneer on the use of educational VR applications for crime scene investigation. His research interests are focused on the application of next generation sequencing techniques for forensic investigations and the development of new tools such as RNA-Seq for time of death estimation and DNA methylation analysis for age estimation. Recently, he expanded his research into single cell sorting and sequencing for complex casework samples.