M3P2 Team

Dr. Giordano is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Texas State University. He has served as President of UCGIS, the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, in 2018-2019. In 2019 he was also a Fulbright Specialist in the Department of History at the University of Vilnius in Lithuania, which led to the funding in 2021 of a spatial humanities project on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania borderlands in the 18th century. Alberto is a founding member of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, a network of researchers and scholars interested in bringing geographical approaches, methods, and perspectives to the study of the Holocaust and other genocides. On this topic, he has coauthored works on the geography of the Holocaust in Italy and in Budapest and on the Armenian genocide, and has received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the USC Shoah Foundation, and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, among others. He is also involved in projects related to the application of GIScience methods and tools to forensic anthropology, most recently concerning migrant deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border, for which he has received funding from the NSF. 

Dr. Herrmann is a Professor of Anthropology at Texas State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology focused on Biological and Forensic Anthropology from the University of Tennessee and a master's and bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on humanitarian forensic anthropology in the United States and abroad, bioarchaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, and technological application in forensic anthropology and archaeology. Presently, he has ongoing research on Soviet Era mass graves in the Republic of Georgia, mapping migrant deaths in the U.S. borderlands, and Late Bronze Age burials and cemeteries in central Greece.

Dr. Miranker is a geographer and forensic anthropologist. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from Texas State University in 2023, earned her M.A. in Biological Anthropology from New York University in 2015, and completed a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies: Human Biology and Law in 2012 from American University. Dr. Miranker’s research concerns migrant death at international borders, their sociopolitical context, and how geospatial technologies may support forensic and humanitarian interventions in ongoing mass disasters.

Dr. Daniell is an interdisciplinary scholar, qualitative data researcher, GIS specialist, and social scientist. They specialize in working with university research teams and nonprofit organizations on projects related to human rights, humanitarian advocacy, community storytelling, and social memory. They have worked extensively in the human rights nonprofit sector and hold a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center and M.S. in Data Analytics & Visualization/Certificate in Spatial Analysis & Design from Pratt Institute.

Their research interests center on how different documentation and data projects can contribute to our understanding of underrepresented histories and the ways that representations of space, time, and events can facilitate digital storytelling and communicate meaning. They teach part time as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt School of Information and consult independently with nonprofit organizations and university-led research initiatives.

Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Texas State University

Dr. Edgar, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Forensic Anthropologist for the Office of the Medical Investigator, New Mexico. She became a Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology in 2020. Trained primarily in bioarchaeology, the study of human populations in the recent (<10,000 years) past, she received her education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (B.A.), Arizona State University (M.A.) and The Ohio State University (Ph.D.). She is the project director for the New Mexico Decedent Image Database, which provides free access for qualified researchers to de-identified, richly documented CT scans of over 15,000 decedents. Her current research includes improving the identification of missing and murdered American Indians, and investigating inequity related to mortality, ethnicity, and other factors among New Mexicans.

Dr. Spradley is a biological anthropologist with specific research interests in human biological variation, forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and quantitative methods. She uses metric data from human skeletons to address identification methods in forensic anthropology, to track population migrations when there is little or no historical documentation, and to explore the skeletal morphological changes associated with human migrations and changing environments (e.g. climate, nutrition, health). Her current research broadly addresses migration and sex and ancestry estimation within forensic anthropology using quantitative methods. More specifically her research addresses Hispanic identification issues. Additional research interests include secular change, growth and development, quantitative methods, and geometric morphometrics.

Dr. Kaplan is a forensic anthropologist focused on identifying the long-term deceased and returning missing loved ones to their families. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in the Applied Anthropology program at Texas State University. Since 2018 she has served as a lead team member of Operation Identification, a humanitarian forensic initiative of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University, which seeks to locate, identify, and repatriate unidentified migrant decedents recovered in Texas border jurisdictions. Her research focuses on improving medicolegal death investigation of long-term unidentified persons throughout the United States and mitigating the migrant death crisis along the Central America-Mexico-US corridor. As a former Consultant Researcher for the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), she remains an active member of the Forensic Border Coalition (FBC), which seeks to assist families of missing migrants through casework and applied research.
 

Jasmine is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Evolutionary Anthropology program at the University of New Mexico. She received a B.A in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an M.S. in Human Skeletal Biology from NYU. Her master’s thesis investigated the histology of the ulnar midshaft at the attachment site of the interosseous membrane to understand how a load sharing soft tissue structure affects rates of remodeling. Jasmine’s current research focus is rooted in her desire to help migrant communities. The U.S. faces a migration crisis along its southern border, driven by conflicts abroad and internal migration policies. For years, migrants have risked their lives crossing harsh terrain to enter the U.S., but policy changes lead to fluctuating migration and an unknown number of migrant deaths. Through the M3P2 project she has focused on migrant deaths in New Mexico, tracking the drastic increase in the caseload at the Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) over the last few years. At the OMI she also assists with forensic anthropology casework. For a dissertation project she hopes to further understand human variation via the skeletal system in Mexican populations.

Veronica is a skeletal analyst for Operation Identification (OpID), a humanitarian forensic initiative at the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State. She received her bachelor's and master's degree from Texas State University in Anthropology. Veronica's master's thesis focused on examining skeletal and dental non-specific stress indicators in OpID cases to contribute to previous research on stress markers for the biocultural profile in unidentified migrant cases. As a graduate student, she worked on collecting data on recovery reports for the Migrant Mortality Mapping Project (M3P2). Her research interests aligns with her personal background of growing up in an immigrant Mexican American community and desire to contribute to research within her own community.

Ivanna is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Applied Anthropology program at Texas State University. She completed her bachelor's degree in Biological Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her master’s degree in Biological Anthropology from Texas State University. Her master’s thesis focused on assessing craniometric variation within Latin American populations. This research interest influenced her doctoral research project and incorporated additional interest in other methods of identification. As part of her doctoral research, she is looking at genetic, craniometric, and isotopic variation within Latin American populations to assess their utility in aiding with the identification of unidentified migrant remains found along the U.S.-Mexico border. Growing up in a border town, her research interests are intertwined with personal experiences, and working on improving identification techniques is something she is extremely passionate about. 

Courtney Siegert is a forensic anthropologist whose research and humanitarian work centers on the identification and dignified treatment of the dead. She earned her Doctorate in Applied Anthropology from Texas State University in 2023, where her scholarship focused on improving methods for estimating geographic origin and population affinity using skeletal data—work that directly informs efforts to identify those who have perished in the Texas Borderlands. Courtney’s deep commitment to this field began as a graduate student volunteer with Operation Identification (OpID) at Texas State University in 2014, and she has since served as a skeletal analyst, field and lab coordinator, doctoral researcher, and now as a postdoctoral scholar with the project. Her expertise extends to forensic casework, search and recovery missions, and facilitating coordination and communication among the diverse stakeholders and organizations involved in medicolegal death investigation in Texas and along the US-Mexico border, all of which support OpID’s mission to provide answers and reunite deceased persons with their families.
 

Courtney has also worked as the Missing Persons and Forensic Advisor for the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Delegation for the US and Canada, focusing her efforts on issues related to missing and deceased migrants. In this role, she promoted dignified management of the dead, advocated for families’ right to know the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones, and facilitated collaboration among governmental, non-governmental, and community organizations.