Hosted by the College of Natural Sciences, the 1 p.m. program in the University’s Faculty Development Center is free and open to the public. Knezovich’s guest lecture, titled “Carbon Dating: Applications to Forensic Science,” is on the schedule during a visit to the CSU Stanislaus campus by a team of officials and scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. CSU Stanislaus officials and science faculty toured the Laboratory on September 29 and extended an invitation that led to the November 18 visit to the Turlock campus.
“We are honored that one of the top scientists at one of world’s foremost research laboratories will make a presentation on the CSU Stanislaus campus,” said Dr. Jane Bruner, Interim Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. “We look forward to developing a cooperative working relationship and partnership with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the near future.”
The use of carbon dating in the recent Amerithrax investigation that sought clues in letters laced with anthrax and sent in the U.S. mail soon after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 will be presented by Knezovich to illustrate the process by which research scientists bring state-of-the-art methods to bear on criminal investigations. New scientific methods developed by Knezovich and his team at the Livermore Laboratory using carbon dating helped lead to the identification of a suspect in the anthrax case. Such innovation could have a far-reaching impact on future investigations.
Knezovich’s presentation will highlight the principles of carbon dating and include examples of how carbon isotope measurements can be used to determine the age of biological items of relatively recent origin. Carbon dating is a scientific method developed in 1949 by Nobel Prize in chemistry winner Willard Libby that has traditionally used the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 to determine the age of materials up to more than 50,000 years old.
Knezovich is the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Director of the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS) and has been a staff scientist at the Alameda County facility since 1983. He oversees scientific programs at the Livermore Lab that are applying state-of-the-art isotope analysis techniques to environmental and biomedical problems.