Dr. Jason Wiersema

Dr. Jason Wiersema is the Director of Forensic Anthropology and Emergency Management at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences (HCIFS) in Houston, Texas. Dr. Wiersema and his team of anthropologists conduct over 400 forensic anthropological cases per year in that role. He is also responsible for the emergency management program for the HCIFS which involves the development, maintenance and exercising of emergency management plans, as well as the acquisition of grant funds to support those efforts. He is a founding developer of the Texas Mass Fatality Operations Response Team (TMORT), which is a state-wide mass fatality response framework that operates out of the Texas Emergency Medical Task Force (TXEMTF). Dr. Wiersema is a Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS). He has participated in numerous local state and federal policy and planning committees including his roles as past chairs of the Disaster Victim Identification Subcommittee of the OSAC and of the Scientific Working Group on Disaster Victim Identification. Dr. Wiersema’s anthropological research interests focus on skeletal manifestations of child abuse and disaster and mass fatality response policy. He has acquired more than $6 million in disaster preparedness and anthropological research grant funding in support of this research. His experience in mass fatality incident response includes the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 tsunami in Thailand, the excavation of mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and numerous multiple fatality incidents in his role at the HCIFS. Dr. Wiersema has numerous peer-reviewed publications in multiple journals as well as book chapters and co-authored books. He was appointed to the Forensic Sciences Standards Board in 2019 and served as the Chair of the Medicine Scientific Area Committee of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees.  He is a current member of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology Board of Directors.