Middle Tennessee State University‘s internationally recognized Forensic Institute for Research and Education and the partnerships it’s built for students’ real-world experience are under the microscope in this month’s edition of “Out of the Blue,” the university’s monthly TV magazine.

The nearly nine–minute segment of the May 2023 program, available below, features host Andrew Oppmann‘s interview with Dr. Thomas Holland, director of MTSU’s FIRE and a research professor in the College of Liberal Arts.

Holland, previously the scientific director of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command’s Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, took the reins at FIRE after founding director and Professor Emeritus Hugh Berryman retired in 2019.

He’s been using his own professional connections worldwide to expand FIRE’s already strong ties to outside experts and agencies and help FIRE’s interdisciplinary training in forensic science, anthropology and criminal justice.

“FIRE’s job is to be this entity that provides opportunities for students,” Holland explains, “so we’re inward-looking, but we also provide educational opportunities for forensic practitioners who are out there working. It’s a way of creating networks for our students with the broader community as well as networks for our students within the MTSU community.”

Those professional networks get undergrad students out into the field — often literally — to provide forensic anthropological services for local medical examiners and police and sheriff’s departments.

“They’re vetted, they undergo background checks and interviews, they have to have a (certain) grade point,” Holland says. “We bring them together; we give them training.

“Then (when remains have been found and) a call comes in, we take these undergraduate students out and they actually get to assist with the recovery of skeletal remains, which is an opportunity that I don’t know exists anywhere else at the undergraduate level.”

Along with the forensic services MTSU students bring to cash-strapped and short-handed government agencies, FIRE offers continuing education to working professionals to keep their skills sharp.

It also welcomes top forensic scientists from around the world to MTSU every semester for special public lectures that draw large audiences ready to learn how true forensic science, not the glamorized TV versions, really works.

MTSU’s “Out of the Blue” is a 30-minute monthly program that features interviews and stories on important university developments and people. It’s available to watch anytime online on MTSU’s YouTube channel and on MTSU’s True Blue TV channel.

The show also airs on Murfreesboro cable Channel 9 daily at 6 a.m., 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Central and on Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV, as well as on NewsChannel5+ at 3:30 p.m. Sundays.

“Out of the Blue” also is available as iTunes and Google Play podcasts and on other cable outlets in Middle Tennessee, and shows are archived on this website, too.

More information about MTSU’s Forensic Institute for Research and Education is available at www.mtsu.edu/fire. The MTSU Forensic Science Program is detailed at www.mtsu.edu/programs/forensic-science.

The College of Liberal Arts incorporates 11 departments with more than 20 academic majors and course offerings from the fine and performing arts, the humanities and the social sciences; its website is www.mtsu.edu/liberalarts.

— Gina E. Fann (gina.fann@mtsu.edu)