Mercyhurst’s Adserias-Garriga contributes to international effort in Disaster Victim Identification
A major disaster, such as a wildfire or terrorist attack, may result in the death of people from many different countries. Recovering and identifying victims requires a coordinated international effort, and Mercyhurst University’s Dr. Joe Adserias-Garriga is part of that process.
Since 2013, Adserias-Garriga, who is co-chair of the Department of Applied Forensic Sciences at Mercyhurst, has been an active member of Interpol’s Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) organization, which is divided into groups of international experts in forensic anthropology, pathology, odontology, DNA, and fingerprinting. As both a forensic anthropologist and odontologist, she contributes to two of the sub-working groups.
Adserias-Garriga recently returned from DVI Interpol’s annual meeting in Lyon, France. The invitation-only event focused on recent mass disasters in various countries and enabled experts to collaborate on refining Interpol guidelines and protocols for victim identification in mass disaster operations.
Among her DVI contributions, Adserias-Garriga helped identify victims of the migration crisis of the Mediterranean Corridor from 2014-2018, the Germanwings airline crash in 2015, the migration crisis between Mexico and South Texas from 2018-2019, and she assisted with the mortuary affairs in New York City during COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.