John M. Butler is NIST Fellow and Group Leader of Applied Genetics at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He is author of the internationally acclaimed textbook Forensic DNA Typing—now in its third edition—as well as more than 100 scientific articles and invited book chapters. His book was also been translated into Chinese (2007) and Japanese (2009). He earned his Ph.D in 1995 from the University of Virginia with Ralph Allen (Analytical Chemistry). His Ph.D. research was conducted in the FBI Laboratory, involved pioneering the techniques now used worldwide in modern forensic DNA testing. Over the past 15 years, Dr. Butler has worked in government and industry.  He designed and maintains STRBase (http://www.cstl.nist.gov/biotech/strbase), an information resource for short tandem repeat DNA markers. As a member of the World Trade Center Kinship and Data Analysis Panel, he aided the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner in their work to identify the remains of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He also serves on the Department of Defense Quality Assurance Oversight Committee for DNA Analysis and advises numerous national and international forensic DNA efforts. Dr. Butler has received numerous awards during his career including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2002), the Department of Commerce Gold Medal (2008) and Silver Medal (2002), the Arthur S. Flemming Award (2007), Brigham Young University’s College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Honored Alumnus (2005), and the Scientific Prize of the International Society of Forensic Genetics (2003). In August 2011, ScienceWatch.com announced that Dr. Butler was number one in the world as a high-impact author (number of citations per paper published) in legal medicine and forensic science for the decade of 2001-2011.