Dr. Charla Marshall
Deputy Director, Department of Defense DNA Operations (AFDIL and AFRSSIR),
Armed Forces Medical Examiner System
Dr. Charla Marshall is the Deputy Director, Department of Defense DNA Operations, which comprises the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) and the Armed Forces Repository of Specimen Samples for the Identification of Remains (AFRSSIR), under the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System (AFMES) on Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. The DoD DNA Operations is the U.S. military’s only human remains DNA testing laboratory, providing services for the identification of fallen service members from current day operations as well as past conflicts extending back to World War II. Dr. Marshall is a molecular anthropologist by training, and her dissertation and postdoctoral work focused on ancient DNA methods and mitochondrial DNA sequencing. Prior to her role as Deputy Director, Dr. Marshall was the Chief of the Emerging Technologies Section of the AFDIL as a contract scientist. She led the AFDIL scientific team to become the first laboratory worldwide to validate and implement sensitive Next-Generation Sequencing protocols for human remains identification. Dr. Marshall is currently leading the SNP capture and extended kinship validation, which will enable nuclear DNA identifications of U.S. military unknowns using reference samples from distant relatives as well as close family members.
Dr. Marshall is active within the forensic DNA research community, having published more than 20 peer-reviewed papers on DNA methods and historical remains cases. In 2022 she was awarded the Scientific Excellence Prize from the International Society of Forensic Genetics for leading the development of DNA capture methods for missing persons identifications with particularly challenging samples. Dr. Marshall is an editorial board member of Forensic Science International: Genetics and the Journal of Forensic Sciences, a member of the FBI’s Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (SWGDAM) and the National Technology and Validation Implementation Collaborative for Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy, an Adjunct Professor of Forensic Science at the Pennsylvania State University, and a Research Affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
