Advisor: Derek Prosser, Ph.D., Department of Biology

In the conventional forensic DNA workflow, the number of contributors in a sample is unknown until the last step of the workflow, STR analysis. My research proposes a high resolution melt curve (HRM) mixture screening assay, which uses support vector machine (SVM) modeling of melt morphologies of STR target amplicons integrated into a common human DNA quantitation kit, in order to determine if a sample is a mixture at an earlier stage of the DNA workflow (quantitation).