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Alec Walen was recently awarded the annual Dean's Award for Scholarly Excellence by Camden-Law.

"Kimberlee Sue Moran is no ordinary geek. As Geekadelphia’s Scientist of the Year, her crowning achievement was blowing up a bus filled with dead animals to help first responders learn how to identify bombing victims.

“They got an understanding of debris patterns and developed a protocol where they could reconstruct what happened and recover both biological and non-biological evidence,’’ explains Moran, a Rutgers-Camden forensic archaeology professor and grant facilitator.

Her forensic exercise was a success. But what was so geeky about it?

Maybe the fact that Moran and her assistants created characters for each animal, complete with names, occupations and phony IDs. Then they dressed them in human clothes. The animals, from the Rutgers Farm in New Brunswick, had died of natural causes or been put down due to illness. 

The Geekadelphia website explains why Moran was a winner. '(She) has done a lot to bring the world of forensic science to the Philadelphia region...'"

As noted by NPR, Professor Desire "oversees the testing of thousands of human remains recovered from Ground Zero and the surrounding area for genetic material that could link them to known victims. The medical examiner's office has tested all 21,905 remains recovered, from fragmented body parts to small shards of bone. But in many cases, it has taken technological advancements occurring over the course of years for any DNA to be extracted.” Professor Desire also leads the forensic science portfolio of the Criminal Justice Program at Rutgers University - New Brunswick. //

See additional coverage here:

https://www.fox5ny.com/video/1705268

https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/9-11-anniversary/2025/09/09/world-trade-dna-9-11-identification

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/11/nx-s1-5526859/september-11-nyc-victims-identifying-lab-dna

Scientists still working to make September 11th DNA matches 24 years later - ABC7 New York

https://bronx.news12.com/meet-the-team-using-dna-to-identify-more-911-victims-24-years-later

"John was 15 when Rutgers academic Jane Siegel encountered him for the first time. His mother was in prison – a chronic thief and drug addict, she had been arrested 31 times and convicted 15 times.  

Ten years later, John’s own rap sheet included eight arrests and two convictions. He’d held a series of dead-end jobs and saw little hope of anything better. He was chronically depressed.

Siegel, an associate professor and former chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Rutgers-Camden, hopes to bring people like John out of the shadows.

Through her 2011 book Disrupted Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison (Rutgers University Press), and more recently through a series of in-depth follow-up interviews with young adults, the researcher has trained a spotlight on a population whose voices are rarely heard.”