In a field where every imprint matters, a Bowling Green State University (BGSU) graduate student is helping refine forensic investigators’ analysis of randomly acquired characteristics (RAC) on footwear impressions.
Katie Roy graduated from BGSU in 2025 with a bachelor’s degree in forensic science and is currently a master’s student in forensic science, working on her thesis project about RACs on footwear impressions.
“My [internship] supervisor brought up that there are some gaps in knowledge in the forensic footwear kind of subsection. So, I ended up poking around my senior year during a capstone class that I had to take at BGSU,” Roy said. “I wrote a paper identifying the weaknesses in forensic footwear comparison and from there, I identified that there is a gap of knowledge in forensic randomly acquired characteristics.”…