Dana Kollmann

Biography

Dana Kollmann graduated from Towson University in 1990 with a BS degree in Anthropology. She went on to complete the MFS (Master of Forensic Science) program at George Washington University, and later earned a MA and PhD in Anthropology from American University.

Dana has 11 years of crime lab experience, 10 of which were obtained through her work as a Forensic Services Technician with Baltimore County Police Department. Dana also trained as one of the department’s shoe and tire examiners. Her experience in forensic archaeology and anthropology has been obtained primarily through her training at the Smithsonian Institution. Dana has a variety of national and international experiences including mass grave exhumation and victim identification in the former Yugoslavia; analysis of Roman plague victims in Croatia; and examination of Mayan skeletal remains excavated from tombs in the Petén region of Guatemala. Dana also does archaeological consulting and is called upon to assist in the exhumation of between 3 and 6 burial sites each year. Dana also serves an anthropologist on the National Disaster Medical System’s Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team and was most recently deployed to Haiti to assist in the identifications of Americans killed in the 2010 earthquake.

Dana’s dissertation published in 2007, entitled "Life and Death in the Eastern Woodlands: A Bioarchaeological Synthesis of Seven Late Woodland Period Mortuary Sites in Maryland," reflects her combined interests in biological anthropology and archaeology. In this study, Dana compared two temporally distinct late prehistoric populations in Maryland’s Upper Potomac Valley and considered the biological consequences associated with the transition to maize agriculture.

Dana is the faculty advisor for the Forensic Science Student Organization. The services of this group of students are regularly requested by law enforcement to assist in the search for human remains and associated evidence.