PhD defence C. (Celia) Díez López

In the last few years, the human microbiome has attracted the attention of the forensic research community as a promising tool to help answering questions in crime scene investigation. Prerequisites were the previous developments and improvements of the experimental and analytical tools for human microbiome analysis, the human microbiome findings in the clinical field, and the increasing availability of microbiome data from different locations of the human body in public repositories. The studies presented in this thesis were some of the first to address forensic questions with the help of human microbiome analysis. The questions addressed with human microbiome work in this thesis include ‘What happened at the crime scene?’, ‘When did the crime happened?’ and ‘Who is the perpetrator of the crime?’. Although the use of the human microbiome in forensics is still in its infancy, the research presented in this thesis, and more to come in the future, holds great promises that eventually human microbiome analysis will become an integral part of forensic analysis, especially whenever other approaches show limitations.

The public defence will take place at the Prof. Andries Queridoroom, 3rd floor Education Center, location Erasmus MC. The ceremony will begin exactly at 13.00 PM. In light of the solemn nature of the ceremony, we recommend that you do not take children under the age of 6 to the first part of the ceremony.