Kenneth G. Furton, Florida International University – The Scent You Leave Behind

On Florida International University Week: How do we improve forensic science?

Kenneth G. Furton, distinguished university professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry, explores a way.

Dr. Kenneth G. Furton is the executive director of the Global Forensic and Justice Center and the chief scientific officer of Florida International University. He is a distinguished university professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a world-leading scholar in forensic chemistry focused on trace detection and olfaction. From 2007 to 2014, he served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, which he reorganized into three mission-based interdisciplinary schools to address some of the biggest issues facing society, raising $50M in philanthropic gifts and doubling research funding to $60M annually. From 2014 to 2022 he served as provost, executive vice president and chief operating officer of FIU where he has led the development and implementation of two FIU strategic plans helping to create a dynamic, results-oriented university with dramatic improvements in student success and research preeminence including simultaneously doubling the four-year graduation rates to over 60%, doubling research expenditures to $250M annually and a 30 fold increase in patents to more than 60 annually achieving a Top 20 patent ranking. He also helped secure over $100 million in philanthropic gifts and FIU moved from #8 to #1 in the state of Florida performance-based funding rankings. Under his leadership FIU was the most improved R1 university in the nation in U.S. News rankings, improving 54 spots in five years to No. 78 public and ranked No. 17 in Innovation and No. 5 in Social Mobility. Deeply committed to the academy, Dr. Furton has supervised the research of more than 140 students and been continuously funded for more than three decades, totaling more than $20 million in grants. He has 32 patents, 2 books and 324 peer-reviewed publications with more than 11,000 citations and an h-index of over 58. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Inventors as well as the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He has received significant attention in recent years for ground-breaking work using dogs and sensors to detect humans, drugs, currency, accelerants, explosives, mass storage devices, invasive species and medical conditions including the coronavirus disease. His researching and deployment of COVID-19 detector dogs during the global pandemic reached an audience of over 2 billion worldwide.

The Scent You Leave Behind

“Any action of an individual cannot occur without leaving a trace.” It’s a principle proposed more than 100 years ago by the world’s first crime lab director Edmond Locard in Paris, France.

Now what exactly is a trace? A trace can be something you came in contact with such as fibers, ink, paint or soils. Traces are also things coming directly from your body such as hairs, blood, sweat or skin flakes containing your human scent.

When you walk into a room, there’s a lot of chemistry happening. You don’t have to do anything but enter a room and your unique odor is the trace you leave behind.

Human odor is a complex mixture of volatile organic compounds – or VOCs – emitted from our skin as gases, caried on the warm air currents around of our body and dispersed into the environment. While you may be able to feel the heat coming off of another person, what you can’t detect is the shedding of their skin cells.

In our study, we collected scent samples from people’s hands by having them touch a piece of cotton and we analyzed their VOCs using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, which is the gold standard in forensic chemistry. What we found with 97% accuracy is that we could determine if that had scent profile came from a man or a woman.

That has never bene done before. Applications of this technique could lead to investigative leads by not only determining the sex of a person but also their race and age and even matching the scent of a particular person who has been in a room. Forensic science is crucial to serving justice. And the more we as researchers can develop additional evidence for cases, the stronger we’re making the justice process for society.

Read More:
[PLOS One] – Multivariate regression modelling for gender prediction using volatile organic compounds from hand odor profiles via HS-SPME-GC-MS