Simon A. Cole is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Director of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at the University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. Dr. Cole is the author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Harvard University Press, 2001), which was awarded the 2003 Rachel Carson Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science, Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (University of Chicago Press, 2008, with Michael Lynch, Ruth McNally & Kathleen Jordan), and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters about the scientific validity of fingerprint evidence and its use in the courts. He is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Science Standards Board Friction Ridge Consensus Body and a Co-Investigator in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Excellence, the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE). He is Co-Editor of the journal Theoretical Criminology, and he is Associate Editor of the National Registry of Exonerations.