Forensic Science: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Book Preface

Forensic science is amultidisciplinary area applying scientificmethods for the purposes of law.This book is a carefully assembled collection of chapters written by the most qualified experts in the areas of forensic chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering. The topics selected for this volume reflect personal interests of the editors and represent cohesive view on the related natural science approaches and their use for the purposes of law. The chapters included in the book overview the most important topics in these subareas of forensic science and provide perspectives of their developments. Since a single volume cannot accommodate all subareas of forensic science, some of them were not included in this book. Particularly, art forensics, computational forensics, forensic accounting, forensic anthropology, forensic archeology, forensic botany, forensic entomology, forensic geology, forensic linguistics, forensic psychiatry, and many other forensic subareas were not included in this volume, allowing in the future further extension of this forensic book in another volume.

The different topics addressed in this book will be of interest to the interdisciplinary community active in the areas of forensic science. It is hoped that the collection of the different chapters will be important and beneficial for practical forensic specialists, researchers, and students working in various areas related to forensic science. Furthermore, the book is aimed to attract young scientists and introduce them to the field while providing newcomers with an enormous collection of literature references. We, indeed, hope that the book will spark the imagination of scientists to further develop the topics.

Finally, the editors (E. Katz and J.Halámek) and publisher (Wiley-VCH) express their thanks to all the authors of the chapters, whose dedication and hard work made this book possible.

Potsdam, NY, USA Evgeny Katz
Albany, NY, USA Jan Halámek