STRmix™ Co-Developer Will Be Featured Speaker at AAFS 2026
Dr. Jo-Anne Bright to Present “Why Not Ys? Probabilistic Interpretation of Y-STRs”
STRmix™ co-developer Dr. Jo-Anne Bright will be a featured speaker at the 78th Annual Scientific Conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, AAFS 2026, the largest annual meeting of the world’s forensic science community.
AAFS 2026, whose theme is “Back to Basics: The Fundamentals of Forensic Science,” is expected to draw thousands of attendees from all 50 states and more than 70 other countries to the New Orleans, LA Ernst N. Morial Convention Center from February 9-14.
Dr. Bright will present “Why Not Ys? Probabilistic Interpretation of Y-STRs” on Thursday, February 12. Her presentation will focus on the work the STRmix team is doing on the development of approaches to the interpretation of Y-STR DNA mixtures.
Dr. Bright is a Senior Science Leader within the STRmix team at the New Zealand Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science Limited (PHF Science), where she has worked since 1999. PHF Science is a New Zealand government research organization, of which STRmix Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary, founded to better serve international users of STRmix™ software.
The co-author of numerous papers and a regular speaker at major conferences around the world, Dr. Bright co-developed STRmix™ – sophisticated forensic software capable of resolving mixed DNA profiles previously regarded as too complex to interpret – with Dr. John Buckleton (PHF Science) and Dr. Duncan A. Taylor (Forensic Science South Australia - FSSA).
Since its introduction in 2012, STRmix™ has proven to be a highly effective tool in producing usable, interpretable, and admissible DNA results in more than 700,000 criminal cases worldwide. It has been particularly effective in helping to resolve violent crime and sexual assault cases, as well as cold cases in which evidence was originally dismissed as inconclusive.
When used with two other applications developed by the STRmix team – FaSTR™ DNA (which rapidly analyzes raw DNA data generated by genetic analyzers and standard profiling kits and assigns a number of contributors estimate) and DBLR™ (which allows forensic laboratories to undertake extensive kinship analysis, carry out rapid database searches, visualize the value of their DNA mixture evidence, and carry out mixture-to-mixture matches) – STRmix™ completes the full workflow, from DNA analysis to interpretation and database matching.
A new version of STRmix™, 2.13, was introduced in September 2025. Like its predecessors, 2.13 builds on previous versions of STRmix™ while adding significant new features including enabling forensic labs to set up multiple PDF report templates for the different report types and automatically generate more than one report at a time for a given calculation. STRmix™ 2.13 also includes new functionality in the Batch Maker module which allows analysts to set up replicate inputs for interpretations.
Dr. Bright received her Bachelor of Science degree at Victoria University of Wellington in 1998 and her Master of Science degree in Forensic Science at the University of Auckland in 2000. She was awarded her PhD in 2015 after studying advanced DNA profile interpretation topics.
Dr. Bright recently presented a day-long workshop, “Supporting Your Laboratory through Legal Challenges to the Use of Probabilistic Genotyping,” at the 36th International Symposium on Human Identification (ISHI).
For more information about AAFS 2026, visit https://www.aafs.org/annual-conference(external link).
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