Élisabeth Cuerrier-Richer is Executive Director of Canadian Universities for Forensic Science since August 2020. Before taking up this position, she was co-founder of the CUFFS group and co-director of the organizing committee for the conference’s first edition, held in April 2019.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the Université de Montréal. She also obtained her master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Toronto in 2019, where she studied Canadian Indigenous population affinity and its application in a forensic context through the lens of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. After her Master’s degree, she completed an internship at Colorado Mesa University’s Forensic Investigation Research Station, in Colorado (United States).
She is currently pursuing her PhD in Applied Anthropology at Texas State University (US) under the supervision of Dr. Kate Spradley. Her dissertation focuses on Hispanic cranial variation to aid in the identification of deceased migrants encountered along the US-Mexico border. She takes a particular interest in humanitarian issues, which is why she volunteers for Operation Identification and joined the Canadian Association for Biological Anthropology’s Standing Committee on Residential School Graves.