When the state crime lab is located right on your college campus, you can turn murder, mysteries, and mayhem into a great academic experience.

Take Oliver Palardy ’10, who majored in chemistry and forensic chemistry at URI. During a summer internship at the Rhode Island State Crime Lab, Oliver learned how evidence is handled and chain of custody maintained, conducted arson investigations, watched a test-fire for bullet casing comparison and analysis of ballistic evidence, and observed an autopsy.

“I chose the internship because I felt it was hands down the best way to prepare myself for a future career in the field,” said Parady, who is now an analytical chemist at Jordi Labs.

For Elizabeth Fontaine ’04, the Crime Lab was the start to an exciting career as an FBI latent fingerprint expert and one of two FBI experts to testify in the Florida murder trial of Casey Anthony, who was charged with killing her 2-year-old daughter in the summer of 2008.

But internships are not all you can do at the RI State Crime Lab, thanks to Crime Lab Director Dennis Hillard, who, back in 1980, saw the lab’s location at URI as the perfect opportunity to spearhead a Forensic Science Partnership that would bring Rhode Island’s top scientists together to fight crime and train the next generations of skilled crime fighters.

The interdisciplinary Forensic Science Partnership offers a chemistry and forensic chemistry major, a forensics minor, digital forensics and cyber security programs, internships with the Rhode Island State Crime Lab, investigative training at staged life-like crime scenes, the latest equipment for forensic analysis of firearms, latent fingerprints, and trace evidence, and more.

Each year, the annual Forensic Seminar Series brings forensic experts to campus to thrill students and community members with tales of their famous investigations. Among them: a retired FBI agent who uncovered corruption in the Boston FBI office and helped bring down racketeer James “Whitey” Bulger and a blood-spatter expert involved in the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the Robert Kennedy assassination investigation.

Students can also work on real-life projects with some of world’s leading forensics experts and URI professors, including textile scientists Martin Bide and Margaret Ordonez, who do fiber analysis for the lab and created a database of dyed fibers for the FBI; computer scientist Victor Fay-Wolfe, who leads URI’s Digital Forensics and Cyber Security Center, which has teamed up with state police to fight child pornography; explosives expert Jimmie Oxley, who works to develop safe training aids for canine bomb detection; and engineer Otto Gregory, whose advanced lab uses scanning electron microscopes and other technology to examine pipe bomb and bullet fragments, analyze cold case evidence, and examine artifacts found on land and in the sea. And that’s just to name a few.

For Elizabeth Fontaine ’04, the Crime Lab was the start to an exciting career as an FBI latent fingerprint expert and one of two FBI experts to testify in the Florida murder trial of Casey Anthony, who was charged with killing her 2-year-old daughter in the summer of 2008. Perhaps the next big crime scene investigator could be you.