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“I’ve known I wanted to work in law enforcement since I was
in kindergarten,” Presidential Scholar Henry Swofford says.
Although not certain of which area of the profession he
wanted to pursue, Henry found his interest working on a
science fair project in high school. His research study on
fingerprints turned into a job at the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation (GBI) that he still holds today. Henry wanted
to know if a correlation existed between fingerprint
patterns and an individual’s ethnicity. He wrote a letter to
the Director of the GBI requesting assistance to collect
fingerprints from their labs. “One lucky milestone in my
life was his agreement to meet with me and allow me to use
their data,” Henry says. “After analyzing more than 20,000
fingerprints from official records, I concluded that
fingerprint patterns
do match ethnicity in most cases. Therefore, if you have a
certain fingerprint pattern scene and 100 suspects, you may
be able to examine a specific ethnicity to speed up
results.”
Henry has presented this research at
the Georgia State Division of the International Association
for Identification, a group of forensic professionals. The
study was also published in the
Journal of Forensic
Identification, an international forensic science
journal. In September, Henry introduced his latest research
on alcohol consumption at the Southern Association of
Forensic Scientists Conference. He tested to see if the type
of foods people eat can determine the speed and absorption
of alcohol based on digestion time. Henry will also present
the alcohol consumption study at the Society of Forensic
Toxicology in
North Carolina
this fall.
“One of the best
things about the Presidential Scholarship is the reputation
it carries. It has given me a great deal of validity when
speaking at these conferences. The use of a laptop has also
been a tremendous asset to my research,” he says. Henry
plans to use his biology major to advance his career in the
forensic science area of law enforcement.
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