A Dundee University PhD student could be a step closer to her dream of working with the FBI.
Maria Maclennan, who is studying the use of jewellery for forensic human identification, has been awarded a full fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to study at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
This could lead to her working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has a jewellery and gem theft division in the US capital.
The jewellery and metal design graduate from Duncan of Jordanstone College has worked on a project linked to Interpol to help identify victims of mass disasters by their jewellery.
In October she will be taking up athree-month residency at the prestigious John W Kluge Centre in Washington as part of the AHRC’s international placement scheme (IPS).
“I am absolutely thrilled,” she said.
“The AHRC only award around 60 IPS fellowships a year, so they’re as prestigious as they are rare.”
She continued: “I am particularly interested in accessing American and worldly newspapers which may highlight jewellery exemplars internationally, or prior to the advent of DNA or modern tools, for example jewellery’s role in 9/11, or after the Titanic.
“The opportunity to visit the USA, meet established scholars and present my work internationally will all be of inestimable value to my work.”
Her ambition is to be a designer in the FBI or an artworker with MI6, and with FBI headquarters also located in Washington DC, she hopes to secure crucial insight and interviews towards her research.
“The FBI have their own jewellery and gem theft division in Washington, so it would be amazing to gain some first-hand insight into the work they do there,” she said.
Maria, 25, spent six months putting her design skills to use at the College of Policing in Bramshill, Hampshire, where she helped develop a visual and interactive online research map of policing and crime reduction research across the country.
That project was funded by a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council, who also funds Maria’s doctoral research.
The Bramshill internship was: “a great opportunity to work at the very crux of knowledge exchange research between creative and scientific disciplines the very thing my PhD is seeking to explore.”
She added: “It allowed me to experience first-hand the knowledge exchange that takes place when design meets policing, as opposed to me observing someone else do it, which brought a whole new personal dimension to my PhD.”
Maria previously worked alongside researchers at Dundee University’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification on a design for a forensic jewellery classification system.
Personal inscriptions, engravings or hallmarks can reveal important clues to the identity of human remains.
Professor Mike Press, director of design and craft at Duncan of Jordanstone, said: “The fact that Maria was selected out of hundreds of applicants across science and the humanities shows the unique nature of her research.
“She is the first person to seriously look at the role of jewellery in forensic identification.
“This shows that her work is truly groundbreaking and it also shows the strength of the research at Dundee University.”
aargo@thecourier.co.uk