I arrived in East Lansing in the early hours of the morning on 23rd July. Having had no time to recover from Vegas, I was picked up by forensic chemist, Dr Ruth Smith on Monday morning. We spent the next day and a half looking at statistical techniques, in particular, Principal Component Analysis. I also got shown around the highly impressive Mass Spectrometry unit at the University, which is considerably better equipped than most institutes I have visited.
The afternoon of 24th July was spent with Dr Richard Merritt, who was the main reason I wanted to visit MSU. He is one of the most experienced and renowned aquatic entomologist, who is also very well known in the field of forensic entomology, and has worked on many cases over the years. I was also fortunate enough to spend a morning with Dr Foran, a forensic biologist at MSU who has a very busy lab of enthusiastic masters students.
Over the course of the week, I was shown around the wonderfully large campus of MSU, went over some case work with Dr Merritt (something I cannot do in the UK, as students do not get access to casework), visited the MSU arab breeding farm, had great food with Rich and his lovely wife and watched some baseball!
Dr Merritt
Baseball - Lugnuts vs the Hotrods!
My time spent with Dr Merritt, Dr Smith and Dr Foran seemed to fly by all too quickly, but I took as much as I could from each one of them as they are all very knowledgeable in their own areas. I was honoured to spend time in their company.
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