Professor Victoria Gibbon is a biological anthropologist at the Department of Human Biology’s Division of Clinical Anatomy and Biological Anthropology at University of Cape Town, South Africa. She leads a transdisciplinary team of researchers in the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium (W4C) to assist with improving investigative outcomes and forensic identification more generally. Dr. Devin Finaughty is a forensic anthropologist/taphonomist with a particular interest in the decomposition ecosystem. South African-born, he is a centennial postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
In this episode we talk about:
Find more about the work Devin and Vicky and others on the team have done together:
https://health.uct.ac.za/anatomybioanth/forensic-taphonomy-identification
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Yvonne Kjorlien: So, I’m gonna get you each to say your names because I don’t want to say your names incorrectly. So, Devin let’s start with you since you have the name I’d probably end up saying incorrectly.
Devin Finaughty: Okay, so it’s Devin Finaughty.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Finaughty, all right. Vicky.
Victoria Gibbon: Victoria Gibbon.
Yvonne Kjorlien: and you are both, not currently located, Vicky, but you are both teaching in South Africa. Is that correct?
Victoria Gibbon: I can speak for myself. Yes. I am a university professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Devin Finaughty: And I am a centennial postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in South Africa.
Yvonne Kjorlien: However you want to start, maybe Vicky if you want to start with your academic background and then we’ll bring in Devin and then Devin you can go through your academic background. How did you get involved, I guess, with forensic taphonomy. What brought you to this place?
Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, so for me, I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba and I went on to do business, actually, at the University of Manitoba and swiftly realized that was not my path and I moved over to anthropology which I was very passionate about. It took me a little bit of time to decide whether I wanted to work on stones and go more into archeology, or whether I wanted to focus on bones and move into biological anthropology. And then after getting my undergraduate degree, I had an opportunity to do a Master’s degree in South Africa, and I came over to Johannesburg.
And I did my PhD at the University of Witwatersrand and there I did a PhD in archaeogenetics when it was very very new and I developed a new method for molecular sex determination, that was also good for forensic cases. And then after that I did a postdoc in colorectal cancer genetics because that paid the bills. And then I did a few other postdocs and moved around. So, I did a postdoc at Indiana, at Purdue University in bioarcheology, and then eventually I got full-time work at the University of New Brunswick.
And then I came into the position I am now at the University of Cape Town. So, when I was at the University of New Brunswick, was the first time that I was classified as a forensic anthropologist. And there was basically no casework for me to be engaged in. I did very little my services weren’t needed but when I came to the University of Cape there was already an established service provider, the forensic anthropology Cape Town’s forensic lab. And we do casework with the local police and forensic pathology services. And so, it’s really moving to Cape Town where it became a more central focus within my research program.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it is…every institution every area every city region is different and whether or not or to what degree they involve I guess academics and in those forensic investigations. And how they involve or if they involve academics in their investigations, isn’t it?
Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely, and also so in New Brunswick there weren’t very many people who are missing and murdered. Whereas — so in Fredericton, where it was a very small number — whereas in Cape Town that number is very large. So, on average we have about 10% of the individuals that come into our mortuaries remain unidentified per annum.
Victoria Gibbon: and the closest mortuary to us at the University of Cape Town has an average intake of around 4 to 5,000 bodies a year. So we’re looking somewhere around two to five hundred people locally who remain unidentified per year and across the country that expands to somewhere between 8 and 10,000 South Africans. So the need is much greater and due to the need it is a direct fuel for research, right? Because where there’s need, research can help fill gaps and maybe improve identification.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. There’s a few things that I want to touch on, but I want to get to Devin first. But yeah, I want to come back to how you’re involved in all that kind of stuff. So, Devin, how did you come to work with Vicky.
What’s your academic path?
Devin Finaughty: So, I grew up in Johannesburg, where I’m now based and when I finished school, I moved to Cape Town to study at the University of Cape Town and I did the whole hog at UCT. So undergrad honors, Master’s, which I then upgraded to PhD under Professor Emeritus Alan Morris, who’s also Canadian. During my Master’s, started to my honors, but then mainly into my Masters and PhD, I had the privilege of being able to work on forensic cases through FACT, the laboratory that for Vicky spoke about, initially as a member and then later as a senior postgrad as a senior member.
And that mainly involved just assisting the senior forensic anthropologists on cases. I hadn’t initially set out to do forensics when I first went to university. I actually wanted to do medicine. I knew about forensics. When I was in high school, I had job shadowed a forensic pathologist at the Hillbrow Mortuary in Johannesburg, which was a very eye-opening experience, as you can imagine. And funnily enough, I was at the mortuary the other day and it hasn’t changed since 2007. It looks the same and it smells the same.
Yvonne Kjorlien: They probably all have the same smell.
Devin Finaughty: Yeah. Mortuaries in South Africa are something interesting. But I didn’t get into medicine; my maths marks wouldn’t good enough. So, I did a general Bachelor of Science degree instead and it was a lecture by Professor Morris in my second year on forensic anthropology or lecture series — he gave us three lectures — that really caught my attention and I sat back and I thought that is a job I would love to do. And I went up to him after the lecture and I said, “your work is amazing. How do I do this?” And he said, “it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. What are you studying for?” and I said, “I’m trying to get into medicine,” and he said, “oh, stick to that.”
Yeah, but I was not to be deterred and I discovered that there was an honors program in biological anthropology. Had never heard of biological anthropology before, but through my own research realized that that’s the foundation for forensic anthropology. And so, I set myself and getting in there. I was able to get in and then I just carried on right through to PhD.
For my Master’s upgraded to PhD research, I established the first taphonomic research program in Cape Town. So, it was clear through the work that I was able to participate in that we didn’t have a very good understanding of the decomposition processes in Cape Town.
And Cape Town is a globally unique biogeographic environment. It’s the Cape Floristic Kingdom, which only occurs in that part of the world. There are thousands of unique species of plants and animals and that, together with a very unique geography, means that we can’t take data from anywhere else in the world and apply it to Cape Town. And as Vicky explained, there is a tremendous need for this information. So, I set about establishing those data.
And that was when I met Vicky. So, when Vicky started at UCT, Vicky, I think in 2016?
Devin Finaughty: Vicky came in, Alan retired. Vicky came in and pretty much embraced me, even though she didn’t have to, she very much took me under her wing and looked after me as I finished up my PhD for three years, in fact, and that’s how it started together. We started doing forensic casework together and doing research together. We started off co-supervising an honors student, who’s now got his own PhD. And our research program together is just, has blossomed really.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, fabulous. Can I just say that medicine lost out. Ha!
Devin Finaughty: Ironically, I ended up teaching the medical students anatomy and realized that I actually wouldn’t have wanted to study medicine.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, you’re happy with your path.
Devin Finaughty: Very much so. I mean, as Vicky said I have now taken a step sideways and moved from human forensics into wildlife forensics, which is something we can talk about later, if you’d like, but I am still involved in human forensic casework through my current position at the University of Witwatersrand as part of the Human Variation and Identification Research Unit.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All boy, that’s just a whole other ball of juiciness right there. All right, so let’s talk a little bit about the work that you’ve done together because I have a smattering of articles on my desk here. Everything from scattering patterns and forensic taphonomy to decomp to vertebrate scavenging. And then there is the forensic realism. So, if you…I don’t know how you two… I’m guessing you’ve probably done presentations together before or group chats before… however you want to tackle that, you go for it because I want to hear it all.
Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, okay, maybe I’ll start there. So, I think one of the things that when I came into this position at the University of Cape Town, Devin was there this work was ongoing and he was with good science and knew science. He was revealing more and more interesting questions that needed to be answered. And students are interested in this work. And like I said earlier, there’s definitely need locally for the information. And so while my passion wasn’t originally to do taphonomic work, I could see the value of the outcome for the city, the country, etc. But also that there were student interest. And there were really interesting questions. And at that point in time, we had a really good facility where we were working. And so, it was quite natural for my research program to shift into that because of this interest. So, my research program even today doesn’t only involve forensics and certainly doesn’t only involve forensic taphonomy. But where we come together is in this forensic taphonomy space, and we had our first student together was Max Spies and he did honors with us and was building on one of the questions that came out of Devin’s research on mongoose and how they play a role in decomposition with the scattering and scavenging.
And that work ended up being very informative for us because we not only started to learn information about the decomposition process, but actually mongoose behavior. And so, when we went to, Devin was called out to a case on Table Mountain and I went with, and while we were there, we could see some tunneling in the fynbos, which suggested that mongoose were there, and both hands and feet of the decedent were missing. The feet were there. The hands were missing.
And this is something we had seen in Max’s project, is that the mongoose target small parts of the body, carry them off, and then eat them or consume them underneath denser vegetation. So that they’re protected while they’re consuming. So, we also knew from Max’s work that the scattering normally took a maximum radius of five meters out from the body (edit: the scatter range is 5-12m). So, we cleared back the vegetation five meters and we recovered all the bones of the hands and the feet plus a watch and some jewelry. So that these are the types of things that actually help with identification, right? Is personal belongings, but also the more we recover of a body, the better the chances we have of identifying the body.
And so that was just our first project that we did together and then that led on to Max pursuing a Master’s which then upgraded into a PhD. And since then also had Kara Adams who’s also now a doctor and she has gone on to expand on the work of both Devin and Max and in new directions. And both Max and Kara are now postdocs with other people at the University of Cape Town and they’re working with us on our current project.
But the shift in our thinking through time shifted to… one of the things that I bring very much to this research is the forensic realism. I’m all about forensic application. Devin’s very interested in innovation and is very focused on the minutiae of how these things work. And so I’ve been really focused on asking these questions about realism and he’s really interested in innovation. And so a few years ago he said to me — I don’t know I think — Devin was like, “wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this totally automated and we didn’t need to go to site every day?” and I was like,
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh yeah!
Victoria Gibbon: “that would be amazing,” because Max went to site every single day. And so did Devin and weighted the pigs every day with a manual block and tackle. And so we approached electrical engineering, I approached the Head of Department there and I said, “we have this idea. Do you think this is possible?” and they ran it as an honors sort of competition. And the students knew the problem and then had to come up with solutions to create an autonomous weighing rig. And then the electrical engineer took the designs the students came up with and then used them to create their own design, which led to our first design. Devin was very instrumental in the creation of that design. And we worked with the electrical engineer, Max, myself, and also Charles Harris (Principal Technical Officer: Department of Human Biology, University of Cape Town), who helped actually build the rig itself.
And so innovation, forensic realism, have become bigger paths within our very targeted research focus. So while our questions that we ask in the students research are very much focused on helping casework, we are also driving and innovating an entire new approach to taphonomic research, and I think that’s where, is an area I’m very interested in and I think at some of our biggest impact is actually happening in that broader space and I think, Devin maybe you could add on to that about the forensic realism and the innovation and how we’re changing things nationally, internationally.
Devin Finaughty: Absolutely. So apart from just improving our own experience of field work and making it more efficient and more cost-effective, which is what automation can do, I mean that the reason I went to Vicky at this idea is that Max and I collecting data, whether it’s hailing or it’s 45 degrees (Celcius) in the shade. So if we…I was like, machines do everything for us now, surely we could get a machine to do this too, at least some aspects of it.
But the other major advantage of moving towards that automation was this is two things. The one is the ability to quantify a lot more of the data that we’re getting. I mean, historically, decomposition has been conceived of in qualitative terms. I mean, if you think of the total body scoring system, for example, even though it’s a score, it is still fundamentally based on a qualitative, subjective observation and we can create all the core definitions that we want about the specific color or the specific thing. The reality is even fundamentally our perception of color is different. It changes based on the light that’s striking the body that you’re looking at. It doesn’t really work in experimental circumstances with clothed bodies because you would then have to open the clothes every day to see what was happening underneath which has a disturbance effect that you can’t quantify unless you have another one that you’re not opening, but then you can’t use the system to monitor that.
So, we were running into these challenges. And then that’s obviously set up against the broader drive to quantification that the Daubert standards brought in, really, for forensic anthropology globally. We don’t have formal rigorous standards in South Africa, but we still hold those as the gold standard, so to speak, and we work towards that. You need that explanatory power. You need to be able to say…you need to be able to tell the courts the likelihood that you’re wrong, more than anything else. And the more quantitative data you have, the best for your chances are going to be able to figure that out and to be able to justify it in a meaningful way.
So, by moving towards automation, we can figure out ways to evaluate decomposition through properly quantitative means, rather than pseudo quantitative means. That’s the one aspect. The other aspect, and this comes back to experimental design and model building, is the ability to collect data from multiple bodies simultaneously. So, we want to build up this model of decomposition. We obviously need lots of instances of decomposition in the given area by geographic area to understand all the nuances in that because every single decomposition sequence is unique, as I’m sure you very well aware and a lot of our listeners are probably aware.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh yeah.
Devin Finaughty: So, to capture that variation you need lots of measures. But if we’re manually collecting data, you go to one body, you collect the data, you go to the next body, you collect the data from that. In most circumstances, most researchers don’t have huge teams of students to go and do all of that simultaneously. And so, if you’ve got lots of bodies, because you’ve got lots of replicates, your data collection time could be several hours. And the reality of decomposition is that the biotic agents of decomposition are going to change their activity within their time slot, right? Because the temperature is changing; the weather is changing. And those fine-scale changes on the ground on a daily basis might not seem like much, but add them together, cumulatively over weeks or months of a decomposition sequence, and they can have really, really meaningful changes in the trajectory and rates of decomposition.
So, if you automate things you can now collect all the data simultaneously, so they are truly comparative and your model is going to be that much more accurate for it. The other thing is you can reduce the disturbance factor, right? If we’re going to site every single day, and we’re chasing away scavengers, we’re disturbing the insects, we are changing vegetation. There are a range of things and there’s some research from Australia from the mid-2000s that demonstrates that disturbance of bodies during the decomposition process does change the rate of decomposition. It doesn’t change it significantly when you pool it all together, but at the individual body level, it can change it significantly.
And back to Vicky’s point of forensic realism, we are actually interested in the individual body, Yes, we’ve got to understand broad patterns across lots of bodies over time, but most of our forensic cases are single clothed bodies at least in our local context in Cape Town. And that’s what we need to be working back towards.
The automation gives a series of tools that help to improve the experimental design and achieve things that the discipline’s been trying to achieve for a long time. We wrote about this quite extensively in the two papers we published on this, which, if the listeners want to go read to understand the argument more holistically, they’re more than welcome to because they’re both open access.
But there’ve been these fundamental challenges in the nature of data collection dating back to the 80s, which we’re still grappling with. And we feel and we hope that this approach, it might not solve those problems entirely, but it could at least get us a step closer towards addressing those and improving the quality of data, that we, as forensic taphonomists, are generating.
And that’s part of the reason we’re putting it out there. It’s also the reason we didn’t patent the system or anything. This is something that needs to be built up and innovated according to individual research groups’ needs because decomposition is such a big and such a complex process, one research group couldn’t possibly hope, in an entire academic lifetime, to capture even a fraction of what’s actually happening. So, we need lots of people working on all the different aspects. But if we then want to combine all of that knowledge and hope to build this really comprehensive picture of decomposition across varied biogeoclimatic circumstances, we need all be collecting data in the same way so that the data are comparable and we’re not doing that at the moment. And this keeps coming out in the literature. It’s been coming out in the literature since the 1980s. And so we’re hoping that this autonomous system, far from being prescriptive, is simply a tool, a framework to capture data in a standardized way that will help us answer the more fundamental questions, particularly around forensic realism.
And I’ll hand back over to Vicky to talk more about that.
Victoria Gibbon: I just wanted to add to what Devin was saying there and I think the critical aspect is it’s not about replicating what we as scientists have for years done in labs and in the field, but actually replicate what we’re seeing in real casework.
Victoria Gibbon: So having our research driven by case work examples. And if I may, Yvonne, I’m cutting here a little bit. I wonder if I could just go back sort of to the beginning because one of the things I think I didn’t say in the beginning is how my role within the police, etc., which because of that role has led me to focus more on what is happening in casework and then have a research approach. So do you mind if I…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, and that was actually, when I said, we’ll get back to that later, that was one of the things I wanted to get back to, so this is perfect.
Victoria Gibbon: So, I’m leading a research group. We call ourselves the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium. And we have built ourselves up. We’re a team of researchers involved in forensic practice in a variety of ways. So, we’ve got members of the team who are in forensic pathology services. We have a forensic geneticist, a forensic isotope analysist, a forensic anthropologist, which is me, and then we have a facial reconstruction expert, who specializes in forensic facial reconstruction. Now we’re all in the Western Cape and we have taken our different roles into this new approach and actually this started with a project that…by Athi Baliso, who’s a new lecturer in our department, and she did her Master’s on a survey of forensic anthropology casework in the Western Cape. And as part of that, she isolated different types of patterns that we see in our local cases. So, terrestrial cases, which are the cases that we find on land, what kinds of patterns do we see most common in the Western Cape? So, when we are driving replication studies, what’s the most common and most impactful replication we can do in order to drive our research. And then similarly with aquatic cases in the same way because we are a coastal city. We do get a lot of wash-up cases, and wash up cases are very difficult to identify for a variety of other reasons.
So, the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium, we are trying to look at ways, what are the patterns and ways that research can effectively improve the application of forensic science across a case in order to see if we can get identification rate improvement. And the main thing is, for years we’ve been really driven by quantitative approaches, like Devin said now about Daubert, etc., so a lot of people have set up experiments where they have multiple bodies out at a time. They’re in close proximity to each other. We even have human decomposition body farms where bodies are literally stacked up. But in reality, we do not see that, we don’t see that in case work. We see single cases as the most common in a terrestrial or on land environment. We see clothed individuals. We see them on the surface. We don’t see them buried and this is in our environment. So, we then now try to replicate those circumstances and we are very careful about an area of research, that Devin introduced me to, is carrion biomass and load in the environment. And this is something that leads to this concept of what people refer to as scavenger swamping. So, when we have… one of the things that we realized through one of our students projects, is that the mongoose are a massive impactful, they play a massive impactful role in decomposition and accelerating the decomposition process locally. The question is, originally, like everyone else in the world, we had four (multiple) bodies out at a time and in fairly close proximity to each other. But as we started to shift our thinking, we said, “what happens if we just put out one body?” And what we found was that it was accelerated… I can’t remember exactly how much, but it was like 10-fold. Devin, do you remember?
Devin Finaughty: 419 percent increase in the rate of scavenging.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. So just hang on put a pause in this — how close were you depositing them before and how close, because I’m guessing you’re not just putting out one season. You’re probably putting them out multiples, but at greater distances. So, if you could shed some light on that for me.
Victoria Gibbon: Devin, go ahead.
Devin Finaughty: So, we were initially running four bodies per season. So, we were looking at two different habitats and the same vegetation zone. So, Cape Flats Dune Strandveld, which covers most of Cape Town, and it’s the most of what is intact left, at least that hasn’t been destroyed by urbanization.
And then we have invasive alien trees called Port Jackson and Rooikrans — Acacia saligna and Acacia cyclops — which form these really dense thickets that people love to hide bodies in because they’re really dense thickets. So, we were looking at those two habitats and we had two pigs in each habitat per season running multiple seasons in…to look at annual effects as well. The pigs were around 30 to 40 meters apart. So, not the minimum of 50 meters.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, that is quite close.
Devin Finaughty: Yes, it’s not the minimum of 50 meters that Matuszewski and colleagues have subsequent the advocated to stop the overlap. But that, as Vicky said, we’re now looking at much further, at minimum 50 meters apart, but still within the same broad habitat so that we’re not falling foul of simple pseudoreplication (an important, underexplored concept in forensic taphonomic experimental design detailed by Schoenly, Michaud & Moreau 2015; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1201/b18819).
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So, before it was within 50 meters now, you’re definitely outside of that 50 meters.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it, okay.
Victoria Gibbon: And so, when we did this experiment where we just put one pig down, we noticed this huge increase in accelerated decomp rate but then that means all the other data we had from years before was really not very useful because that’s not what we see in reality and so it started making us think really differently about what we were doing on the ground. And also feeling very critical about what’s coming out in the international literature because scavenger swamping is the idea where you have too many bodies out and scavengers actually are, by their nature, opportunistic feeders. So, you get the pulse, the carrion pulse comes into the environment and they monopolize on it. But when all the sudden there’s lots of carrion pulses, which is really unnatural, then their behavior becomes unnatural and then what we found is they would end up feeding on which, the heaviest fed-on carcass ended up being the one closest to trees or areas where they could feed in a way that protected them from birds and their own predation. So, we started to think a little bit more about our own structure and design and how we can change that and the mindset internationally and we are making big changes locally on forensic realism and having casework drive research, rather than research drive casework, or try and do the opposite, which doesn’t work. What we’re seeing is that we’re not being very effective and we’re actually struggling to get the message out internationally. There is a huge resistance to this approach.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Welcome to my world.
Victoria Gibbon: So we still battle on and sometimes we struggle to get our papers accepted because then people will turn around and but you only have data from one or two pigs at a time but when you use this approach, it means you have to do many, many years of data collection before you build up a data set, but it doesn’t mean the baseline data we’re producing isn’t more accurate than what we had before.
Devin Finaughty: Or valid.
Victoria Gibbon: Or valid. Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Exactly. Yes. It’s music to my ears. Let me just say there’s some times… I feel like many, many years. I feel like I’ve been screaming into the void and just crickets. Nobody sees the value of it. So, to have people like you come along and doing this work. I’m feeling pretty vindicated at the moment actually.
Victoria Gibbon: Good. We’re making a difference for one.
Yvonne Kjorlien: But you’re right this is several researchers’ lifetimes worth of work. The variables are just so complex, there are so many of them. We have to dig to figure out what they are and then to try to figure out how they’re integrated, how they interplay with each other because we’re working in naturalistic, very real situations.
I came across a student poster once — and apologies if you are listening, but this is an example — that the poster was an experiment that she had done. She used remains that had already been embalmed and then she put them out to how they would decompose and I’m like, how is this real? What’s the likelihood that investigators would be called upon a scene to find embalmed remains.
Victoria Gibbon: Never. Never in a way that’s actually forensically interesting because an embalmed body, like the application would be very minimal, if at all.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I know what you’re saying about, using the case studies to direct what and how you’re doing the research, that makes complete sense.
Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, absolutely.
Devin Finaughty: If I could add to that. So, I mean this is the approach…like what we’re describing isn’t brand new to toponomy. When Dr. Bill Bass started the Tennessee facility back in the 80s, this was the approach that they used for the first 10 years. They were replicating what they were seeing in casework. But then as we grew in our knowledge of all the variables that were at play, we sort of started to focus in on those and temperature, is, as we’ve seen in the literature, has been the overwhelming focus.
But that made the research very reductionist and my sense is that, for the last at least two decades, we’ve had a very hyper-focused, very reductionist approach to the research, which has led us to ignore a lot of the other factors that are at play. This is what we were starting to see in our own research, as Vicky described. We’re saying, actually, most people are excluding scavengers because they’re interested in the insects or they’re interested in some else. “We’re trying to get the baseline decomposition and then we’ll add in all the variables”. But the reality is that the baseline that really matters is the forensic case. That’s the baseline once we know what happens there, then we can start to go into the minutiae and break it down. We can’t hope to build it up to the complexity of a forensic case, as you rightly pointed out. We’re dealing with biology. Biology is complex and messy. We’re probably never going to be able to realistically, accurately, mathematically describe it, at least not with the current tools and technology that we have. We might get there one day. But we can get approximations that can still be useful forensically. And in our context in South Africa, any information is useful. Even if it doesn’t make it to court, if it just helps guide the investigation, that is worth having. And that’s our goal. Part of the pursuit of the forensic realism, other than just trying to replicate what we’re seeing in casework, is also having a much bigger focus on the ecology.
So, my undergrad is in human physiology and zoology and I’m a closet conservationist, though very much coming out to the closet in that regard now. So, I’m also very, as Vicky said, I’m very interested in the innovation side of things. I’m also very interested in the ecology of what’s happening. And a lot of what Vicky is described with our building this knowledge on the mongoose, that’s core ecological research. And we’ve uncovered a lot of information about this particular species’ biology and its life history patterns, that were actually not known to science because they’ve never been studied in this context. They’ve been studied in nature reserves, where you don’t have frequent anthropogenic pulses of food. And that’s what we knew. Now you bring it into a city site — we’re looking at the sort of peri-urban and we still kind of are looking at peri-urban — but in the urban settings, we hadn’t seen — at least in the leafy suburbs, we hadn’t seen mongoose — but certainly on the fringes, in a city like Cape Town, which is surrounded on many sides by large natural reserves, these animals are coming into our space because we’re encroaching into theirs. And that’s true of many urban areas, even in Johannesburg, which is a city bigger than London with a bigger population. They’ve seen, in the middle of the CBD (Central Business District), they’ve seen scavenging by two species of mongoose, amongst other things. So these animals are coming in. You can’t be excluding them. It’s much better to just say, “Let’s look at what’s happening in forensic cases. Put bodies down and just see what happens and then we can build from there.” That should be our baseline. And that I think is really that’s one of the core impetuses of what we’re trying to do is to bring it back to that realism.
Otherwise, it’s not going to be as useful and as impactful as it should be and could be.
Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, one thing I just want to add to that is I remember one of the projects we were working on we had nude pigs. Unclothed. And I remember saying, “but we never find nude bodies. They’re so rare. So why are we doing this?” And then we started doing the clothed project and we actually compared the data on clothing and unclothing, but also clothing changes the ecology, right? Because it changes where insects go, how insects can access, how scavengers can access, it changes their behavior, it changes then the decomposition across the body.
And so, then Alan Morris, at that time he was retired, and I remember he said but the clothes have to fit the pigs like they fit people. And so, then we had to get a seamstress, and we did an entire review of the clothing types that we get in cases, the most common things that we see. Cotton t-shirts. We don’t see a lot of polyesters. So, what are the most common things? So, we have an entire clothing set-up that is based on a review of casework. Then we go and buy our clothing in on the same day for all of the experiments, across all the seasons, and we buy it from the most common everyday person store in South Africa. So, we buy from Ackermans or Pep, and so that we are replicating accurately what people would wear and everyday clothes, and then we take them to the seamstress, and we’ve created a pattern, took measurements of the pigs, and where they change a lot is in the pants. So, the way the bum fits in the pants and the tapered little legs, but even in our winter one, so when we do a winter season, we’ve got winter clothes. So, they’ve got a sweater on, a t-shirt on, a belt, they’ve got jeans or denims and then they have little baby socks and baby shoes on. And in summer we were going to put flip-flops. We realized that’s kind of counterintuitive because they just fall off, so we don’t put anything on the feet and summer. And in summer, they also have on denims or jeans and then they just have a cotton t-shirt. And they wear underwear. We get them nice new fresh underwear and everything. And then on the day, because of the way the pants fit on the body, we actually sew up the seat of the pants on the pig on the day.
And so, we sew them right up the back end. And so, then they are tailored perfectly to the body just like our clothes are tailored to us, which prevent a barrier for animals, for example, to scurry at the leg and get in. And so those tapered pants that fit them like they do us is important. Now these kinds of nuances in our research, I think sometimes get lost in the publications, but I think we should talk about them. So, I just wanted to raise that we do actually have seamstresses that, over many years now, who have helped us prepare clothes for pigs.
And also, the other thing I wanted to talk about here is the fact that we talk about forensic realism, but then we use pigs, which, of course, aren’t real. What we set out to do, and in South Africa at the moment, it’s not legal to use donor human bodies in this kind of research outdoors. Look, and we are looking at trying to move in that direction. But I also have a fundamental block on the realism of donor bodies in general because who donates their body to science do not match the people who end up being in forensic cases. They don’t match in age. They don’t necessary match in gender, and they most importantly do not match in health. So, the majority…and we know that that affects the ecology, because animals that are sickly, other animals don’t want to eat sick animals. So, if we use donor bodies and the person is elderly and has maybe even been on medicines and all of that, those bodies — and this speaks to what was said earlier — that they emanate smells, like embalmed bodies, that are very different than what is natural. And the majority of people who end up in forensic investigations in South Africa tend to be younger men. And they don’t tend to be elderly, sickly people. They tend to be typically physically healthy young men. And so, using donor bodies, I’m not sure is a perfect analog, either way.
So, I’m not saying that pigs are a good analog or the best analog, but I don’t think having a donor farm in South Africa would replace pig research. I think we need to be able to control how the animal died. Being able to control all the circumstances around the death and the termination to make them as forensically accurate as possible. And not have to worry about all these other influences that people really aren’t controlling for in human donor body farms.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I think that what Devin said before about the approximation, we’re approaching, and we may spend lifetimes approaching and it may just be an approach.
Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely.
Yvonne Kjorlien: We’re just you continually refining an approximate, and if that’s as good as we get, then that’s as good as we get. But I think you bring up a valuable point that there are so many variables that either we’re taking for granted, we’re overlooking or we’re not accounting for.
Victoria Gibbon: Exactly.
Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely, and then the other part of it is, when I started this work and recently we were kind of called out on this, in my mind, my big sales pitch was time since death, right? So, we’re helping improve time since death (estimates). But actually, over the years, I think that it’s not really about time since death. It’s really about the nuances of how bodies decompose and it’s those nuances that actually are more informative on the forensic lead. So, it’s not actually about the exact time since death. And now I’m no longer using that as my sales pitch. It’s about helping the police investigation on the ground, get started, and that time with that case where we had seen something with the mongoose and then we can apply it in a real case that improves our ability to recover the body fully. And also, I [end] up recovering personal belongings, which are quite diagnostic for individualization. So, it’s about the forensic leads, and it’s about these nuances that help us help the police get their forensic leads and run their investigation, which ultimately lead towards identification.
So, I used to think that forensic anthropology is really about us helping to identify the person. And over the years, I’ve realized, no, my role is to serve the police in improving investigative leads and to help with their investigative process. And so, with W4C, or the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium, that’s our drive. We are trying to, through forensic science, improve forensic outcomes for, not just the police and forensic pathology services, but for the decedent, their families, and the loved ones who have no closure. And so, how can we improve closure? Through science. And how can we facilitate that? But meanwhile still be doing interesting, exciting, innovative science as scientists.
So, it’s the twofold, where we’re at now.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Devin, I’m gonna hand this back to you.
Devin Finaughty: That was a very mic-drop-moment from Vicky. I’m not sure how I can add to that. So eloquent! And maybe I can sort of just hone-in on some really specific examples…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Sure, yes.
Devin Finaughty… that really illustrate what Vicky was saying. So, if we go back to the case that Vicky mentioned before, about the case that we did on Table Mountain, where we were… we didn’t have to recover the decedent’s hands or the jewelry or the watch. In that case, the police really had a pretty good idea of who the decedent was and we often say it’d be really helpful if people died with their identity documents. And in this case, that was (the case); the person had their wallet, their driver’s license, IDs, passports, everything. So that wasn’t the question. And this speaks to Vicky point, which is our role there wasn’t to facilitate identification. The police, I mean the remains were skeletonized, so we had to do an osteobiographical profile because the decedent could have those items associated, but they’re not primary identifiers, so you still have to do that. But in that case, I think our role much more fundamentally was giving the whole of the decedent back to their family. So, bringing them together as a person, making them whole, and then giving them back to their family.
I spent five years working in the UK just before returning to South Africa. I worked at the University of Kent. And one of my colleagues was in the London Metropolitan Police for 30 years. And we spoke about lots of cases that they worked on. And in the UK, red kites are prominent scavengers of remains, especially in rural areas. And they carry pieces of the body off and they never recover them. And my colleague said to me a lot of families are really upset by that. Even if the finger missing, and even if… There are some families where there are cultural rights that cannot be concluded because the body is not whole, but even if that’s not the case, you still want all of your loved one.
And, the work we’re doing, looking at the mongoose in our context, and very much the work you’re doing in Canada, looking at the scattering patterns there. There’s so much important work within that, that isn’t related to identity, but is just about the ethics of the work that we do and restoring dignity in death, both to the decedent and giving complete closure to the families. And that really needs to be – and should be – one prominent things that underpins our work. And we very much have that close at heart.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for that because, Vicky, I love that you have refocused not on the identification, and more on the outcomes and being of service to the investigators and their outcomes, and also the ethical issues of closure and giving that back to the families. The reason that I’ve kind of framed our work in terms of the identification and increased recovery of the amount of remains so that closure may be possible, etc., is because just that it’s almost like the families need to drive the ethics of having closure and getting their loved ones back as complete as possible, because the investigators are that middle piece in there, where as long as they can get the identification and get the evidence they need for the case, that’s good for them. But what’s good for them, may not be good enough for the family. And so even as us on the other side where we’re in service to both the investigators and the families, even though we want to eventually appease the families and their desire for closure, we have that the investigators in between, they’re saying, “You know what? I just need an identification and enough evidence to serve my case.” So how do you negotiate that?
Victoria Gibbon: So, this is a trickier space and I think and in the South African environment, probably quite different, Yvonne, than what you experience in Canada, just because of mass. So, for example, with 300 people being unidentified in our local mortuary per year, the police have far less capacity to actually give each case the same amount of energy that it actually needs or desires. And that’s not because they don’t want to do it. It’s because there’s just no more hours in the day and …
Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s capacity.
Victoria Gibbon: it is absolutely capacity. And so, anything that we can do to help them in their casework, they will run with it, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role. And actually, with W4C currently, we have done these five cold cases and we’ve put a lot of science into them and we are struggling to get them identified with the police. We have big campaigns and we’re doing everything we can. But one of the things that’s coming up is we had what we thought was a probable ID and it turns out that it wasn’t the right person. And that has created this new engagement with this family around giving them hope that this could be their missing loved one for years, and then having to go back to them, after creating hope and saying, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t yours.” But then having to… it opened the door for them to communicate to us what it’s like to be on the family side. And to just be totally unaware of where your loved one is and how desolate that can feel for them. And they are now saying to us, “How can we help you identify these people and us, and help you and you help us?”
And so one of the things that this family has said is, “I’m going to do a radio interview and I’m going to talk about my experience and we’re gonna talk about what options are available out there because, while this didn’t lead to my loved one being this person, it’s someone’s loved one”. And so, there’s so much empathy and power actually for these en masse in South Africa, which I think is untapped for these families to actually move together and to push for changes in legislation.
So currently in South Africa forensic science is not forced in any case. It’s not legislated. It’s at the discretion of the pathologist if they want a forensic scientist involved. That could change. Now, if government mandated forensic science to be involved in every single case…so the forensic pathologist always does their role like that is part of their mandate but additional forensic scientific methods are not mandated. So if they were mandated in legislation, we instantly create jobs, when you have jobs, you have people, people with forensic scientists who can pick up that capacity that the current investigation in South Africa can’t carry.
And so now we’ve started to talk about, and even in W4C, we started to try to figure out what are our gaps in identification locally, and what are challenges. And the number one thing that came up — sorry Yvonne, this is kind of taking us in a different direction — but the number one thing that I went into the project thinking was that my science was going to bring a solution. And when we started talking to people on the ground, the number one thing that the people involved — the police, the pathologists — they said there’s a disconnect between the missing person’s form that people fill out at the police station and the unidentified body form that’s filled out at the mortuary. So, these two forms do not speak to each other and therefore their ability to match. And so, then I started looking into these forms. And I originally went provincially and the head of detectives was like, “you’re never going to change the national forms, like forget it.” And I just got the hell in and started making some calls to people I knew in the police and I said, “I need to know who I can contact here,” And sure enough I was able to get a phone number for somebody who’s in the national detectives. And when I called him, explained who I was — and my friend who’s a cop told me all the things not to say and what to say — and so I opened with who I am, and I said, “I was wondering if I could help partner, and help the police improve their missing persons form.” And he was first was like, “no, our forms are fine.” And then I pointed out some really problematic aspects on the form, which I’m not going to repeat here on the podcast. But he was like, “no, it doesn’t say that.” I said, “it does say that. Just pull it up.” And then he was like, “Uh oh.”
And the form, I just found out this week, has been rolled out for pilot in two provinces. So, we’ve totally revised these two forms and they now speak to each other. They are all PDF driven. They’re form-fillable. They’re very transformative, and I’m hoping they get through. And if they get through, they will be the first police missing forms internationally that have non-binary as an option and the…how do we improve… and so then the next step for me is to go back to my electrical engineering friends and say, “can we run an honors project on how to make these PDF forms into [an] app for the police?” And then the data is filled in real time and not having a 30-day delay to be manually filled out and manually entered. And the forms were 12 pages long and now are only seven pages. So, the ability for someone who’s grief-stricken to fill out a missing person’s form is also reduced for both the police officer and for the family member.
And so sometimes, I guess one of the things I just want to say here, is that while we do think our science is informative and I do believe the science we do is good. Sometimes asking people on the ground what would be the biggest difference in improving identification rate? They have solutions that actually, like in this case, it was just an administrative aspect of reworking a form, that in few years, I’m hoping we will actually see an improvement in the matches between missing persons and unidentified bodies in South Africa. And it’s probably going to be the most impactful thing I ever do in my career…
Yvonne Kjorlien: It’ll be completely unresearch-related.
Victoria Gibbon: Exactly! It’s like basically. I was a secretary for the police. I redid their form. So, I do think that these nuances and our impact, we need to be thinking about our power and privilege within the research space, within the university space, to make and affect a real change on the ground. And that’s by having conversations with people on the ground, the police, the pathologist, and the families.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Wow. And, you know what? Yeah, I agree. That’s probably gonna be the most impactful thing that you will be remembered for, and you will ever do; however, yes, it was because of your research the position that you hold and your network that you were able to do that. right and no.
Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, I also think that I’ll never really like I brought it up here, but it’s not the kind of thing you can publish, right? So, it also not something I’ll really be known for, it’s just something I’ll know I did myself. I told you two. Up and…I can’t say I did it all myself. There was a three of us who worked on it together, but it’s interesting.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m conscious of the time so, Devin, I’m gonna give it back to you because I think future directions is kind of where you’re at right now with your little switch into wildlife taphonomy. So, if you want to talk a little bit about that and where you kind of see that taking you in the next, maybe five to ten years.
Devin Finaughty: Sure. So, the first thing I want to say is to 100% agree with what Vicky’s just said. My wife and I just met with someone here, we’re up in the Waterberg, in northern South Africa at the moment. And we met with someone who represents one of the local security clusters. And it was just a meet and greet. The take-home message from that conversation – we wanted to know about what is poaching like up here and that – and the take home message was… my wife and I want to want to help, right? We want to take the knowledge and skill and experience that we have in human forensics and apply to the wildlife forensic space. Because a lot of what we do — the forensic taphonomy, the forensic entomology — my wife as a forensic geneticist that specializes in degraded DNA — that isn’t being used in a wildlife forensic space and we feel like there’s something that we could add there. We’re not coming in to tell people what they’re doing wrong at all. We’re just trying to find out how we can help them improve investigative outcomes.
Because, I mean, you’ve heard from our conversation that the missing persons problem that we’ve got is up to 10,000 people a year, which is a catastrophe. And we’ve got a similar problem in wildlife forensics. Although the problem there is very, very poor prosecution rate. So, the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa is very proud of the fact that they’ve got a 96% prosecution rate, and they should absolutely be proud of that. It’s fantastic. But less than 10% of the cases that are actually brought to the prosecutor make it to trial. And it’s mainly for want of evidence.
So, we have this conversation today basically saying we’re here to help, and the take home message from that is: relationship building. We need to go out. We need a build relationships with all the stakeholders, with the community members, with the local police, with the local farm owners, all of that. We’re not going to be able to do anything if we don’t do that. And I think that really underscores what Vicky had said, which is, regardless of what forensics you’re doing, especially when you’re operating — we’re “pracacademics”, right? We’re doing practical work, but we’re also doing the research. But both of those things ultimately need to serve the stakeholders, at the end of the day. And there are two ways of dealing with the stakeholders. There’s the top-down way of saying we’re the knights in shining armor coming to solve all your problems, this is what we’re going to do, versus we see you’re struggling, you need help. We’re here to help. How can help? And it’s a subtle but very important change of approach that we’re seeing same in the wildlife forensic side.
So, where I’m going now is I’m not leaving taphonomy or the entomology that I do — so I do the forensic taphonomy and entomology together because they go hand in hand together — but as I said, I’m trying to bring that into the wildlife forensic space. I’m also trying to understand very much — what Vicky has just been doing where she’s trying to get to the bottom of what are some of the root causes for the lack of human identification — I’m trying to get to the bottom of why are so few cases actually making it to the prosecutor’s office.
There’s lots of anecdotal information about: oh, that’s a lack of evidence, the police are not collecting things on scene for variety of reasons, I mean straight back to the resourcing point that Vicky brought up. There’s a small team, we learned today that there’s a small team of people to cover an entire province. Poaching scenes can be four to five hundred kilometers apart. The team simply cannot travel all of those distances to multiple scenes and hope to collect evidence. And then there’s quite a good intelligence community here looking at, if an event happens, they can often track the gang that’s perpetrated and say, ”Let’s go and grab them,” then they go and arrest them but then they can’t tie them back to the scene because they never took the time to process the scene. So, they’re held for 48 hours and then they’re released, and the cycle perpetuates. So there needs to be some capacity-building. But how do you… that capacity building is gonna have to come on policy side, right? The state has to devote more resources. Straight back to what Vicky said. You can’t motivate for that policy if you don’t have data. You can bring all the anecdotal information to parliament that you want. They’re just going to shrug their shoulders and say, “that’s what they say.” I’m very keen to establish some hard data on the efficacy of our current forensic practice; I can’t for the entire country, because South Africa is a big country and the nature of wildlife crime is very different depending on what province you’re in. The Western Cape, where Vicky is, doesn’t have a major problem with poaching of, say, rhinos and elephants because they’re very few there, but it’s got a huge problem with marine poaching, particularly of abalone and of succulent poaching. That’s completely different and I need an entire lifetime to do all of those different things, or multiple lifetimes I should say. So, I’m interested in doing it for Bushveld and Lowveld areas of South Africa. Just understanding what’s happening in these areas. And then hopefully bringing some more tools to the table.
So, I’m quite interested in bringing forensic entomology into the space, partly to add additional lines of evidence. So, much like the human cases that Vicky has mentioned, where time since death/post-mortem interval isn’t a major query much of the time, but if you can have that, you can use that to help to link people to scenes, that’s useful. And forensic entomology is, to this day, still the most accurate way of estimating time since death, regardless of what’s died. It just is. But I can’t take the protocols for collecting entomological evidence that we use for human scenes and hope to apply them to wildlife crime scenes because it’s a totally different context. We’re talking about rangers potentially trekking 20, 30 kilometers on foot.
Now they’ve got to sample insects at the scene and bring them back. How do they bring them back alive, number one, and two, in temperature control conditions where I don’t have them carrying — even five extra kilograms of weight over 30 kilometers is a lot because that could be five liters of water for them when it’s 40 degrees Celsius. But you can’t figure any of this out if you’re not going to the scene. So very much like what I was doing with forensic entomology human cases, where I was going to scenes with forensic pathologists at their invitation, or their officers, and just seeing what was happening and trying to figure out — how can I optimize the existing protocols for your circumstance? Our forensic pathologists in South Africa, for example, can’t take boiling water or ethanol to scenes; they’re not allowed to. So you gotta come up with a different way of, you can’t preserve the insects on the scene. You have to bring them back to mortuary, but then you’ve got to account for growth and all sorts of things. So we have to tailor it. That’s one of the aspects that I’m doing is developing and optimizing those protocols for rangers.
The other reason I’m doing it is because one of the primary sources of mass mortality poaching in South Africa is the use of poisoning. So, using things like cyanide or glycophosphate. And water holes get poisoned, so, herds of animals -anything – that comes to drink from that waterhole dies. And then a much more worrying recent trend, particularly in the Lowveld area of South Africa is that poaching gangs are poisoning the carcasses of animals that they’ve killed. So, they kill a rhino, they de-horn it, and then they poison that carcass because the vultures that come to feed in the carcass are a beacon to the security operatives to say, there’s a case there, a potential case, and they make a beeline. And obviously the poachers want as much time as they can get to get away from the scene. So, they’re just poisoning the carcasses to kill the vultures to remove that beacon. And some of our vulture species in South Africa, just in the last five years, have gone from vulnerable to critically endangered as a result of this practice. And the Environmental Management Inspectorate is really struggling to get on top of this because the post-mortem samples that they’re taking from the carcasses, they’re not able to identify what the toxins are in many cases, and even if they are, they have no idea what the concentration is. So, when I said to them, “but have you sampled the maggots that are feeding on the body?” Because then you are [looking at] volatile organic compounds that are being amplified by the same process and you’re just looking at that and they said, “oh no, can you do that?” I said, “yes, here’s the literature that says you can do this.” “Oh, we’d love to do that!” “Great. You need the protocols first.” So that’s another reason to develop those protocols.
And then we also just need baseline developmental data for the forensically relevant species that we’re dealing with, because we have very limited coverage for the northern part of South Africa. The last concerted forensic entomological work that took place north of Pretoria was in the 80s and climate change is real. And we know the developmental biology of insects, which are poikilothermic ecototherms, is very intrinsically linked to temperature. We’ve seen this in one of the species that’s invasive to South Africa, [Calliphora vicina] that comes from the northern hemisphere. In the 70s and 80s, there were a handful of records. Now, they are the dominant species on human forensic cases and wildlife forensic cases in the cooler months of the year South Africa, the dominant species.
But that species wasn’t around 20 years ago in the numbers that it is now. So, we’ve got these species that we could potentially use, but the whole basis of forensic entomology is you need to understand their developmental timelines. So, you need the data for that. So, I plan to sample those species from their locales and do prospective laboratory experimentation to update the developmental standards for a selection of species. I can’t do them all. Far too many. And again, I have a… my contract is for two years, not 10 years. We’ll see what we can do in the two years. But that’s really what I’m doing at least for the next two years, and the hope is that that will continue to grow into continued work in the wildlife forensic space. And hopefully bring to bear some improved outcomes, much the same as Vicky is trying to do with W4C.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I am feeling so honored and privileged to share airtime with you, both of you at the moment. You are doing such amazing work. You’re both so passionate and you’re asking some fundamental questions about the root of why things are happening the way they’re happening and how to change that. And I am beyond honored to share the space with you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Wow.
Vicky, future directions for you?
Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, so with forensic taphonomy, Devin and I currently have a new project. We’ve deployed some pigs about six weeks ago, and it’s the first time we’ve deployed on Table Mountain, which is the second most common bioecoclimatic zone we find bodies. And the majority of the bodies that come on Table Mountain, die from stab wounds. And so, it’s the first time we’ve actually done trauma on bodies in — and so pig bodies — and they are clothed and what we — just as hashtag watch this space — but the untraumatized versus the traumatized decompose very differently. And I guess that’s not really surprising. It’s what we hypothesized. We thought we were going to get a lot of scavengers. Hashtag none yet. So, we’re a bit disappointed there. So, we’ve got this season, now it’s winter for us, and we’ve had a wicked one so far, so things are unique and interesting. And then we’ll do a summer deployment and we’ll go from there. So that’s where I’m at right now with taphonomy. And with W4C, we will continue in our drive to try and assist on the ground and we are revealing more and more every day how we can help in different and unexpected ways within the system and work within the system. So that’s where we’re at.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Several lifetimes’ work cut out for both of you. I wish well you on that. Especially on a two-year contract, Devin.
Victoria Gibbon: And I did want to say, Devin, how nice it was to hear you speaking and also seeing that, again, like what I said earlier, we both go into this work thinking our science is the solution, but actually it’s the way that we have moved towards our approach and the approach that we develop to forensic science that actually is movable into both the wildlife forensic space and in the human space because it ends up being, I think that’s the most important thing that our impact will be is really how we approach and hear from the ground to change the way we, our role and also the policy. So, it’s identifying the problem and then trying to do the policy change. It was so nice to hear you talk about that too. And Yvonne, thank you so much for creating this space for us and it’s been such a pleasure for us as well.
Devin Finaughty: Thank you, Yvonne. It’s been wonderful. And I also just want to say for the record that I have learned an incredible amount from Vicky. I mean, she’s complimenting me here, but it goes back tenfold. Vicky has been an amazing mentor to me. I couldn’t ask for better, and I mean that sincerely. And I would encourage all the young scientists to find someone, to find their Vicky, that can help guide them and grow them. As that’s my hashtag advice for the day.
Victoria Gibbon: Thanks so much, Devin. I do think that we work well together, we’re complementary, Yvonne, and that’s also I think a big thing about being a good scientist is recognizing you can’t do it all on your own and figuring out the people who can complement and together you can do a lot more with additional skills, then you can do on your own and that’s definitely true for Devin and I.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely.
