Year 12 Criminology Taster Day

Katherine: We've got extensive forensic facilities. These range from our crime scene rooms and our crime scene suites, right the way through to our mock courtrooms as well.

Helen: Our equipment here will equip our students to be able to carry out similar forensic processes in the real world.

Aaliyah: The eco lab has a variety of different growth cabinets and other equipment that we use to help rear larvae into adult flies that we used for various different applications within forensic investigation. The eco lab is really beneficial for students, as it allows them to understand decomposition and try out a variety of different types of practicals that they'll come across during their decomposition studies.

Katherine: The microscopy suite that we have include stereo microscopes and compound microscopes for looking at larger items like footwear and flies. Also, smaller items like slides of pollen and diatoms. We've also got comparison microscopes for ballistics and gunshot residue, as well as micro CT for looking at those really tiny samples, such as bones and teeth - anything on that really tiny nanometre scale.

Helen: Our fingerprint laboratory has a wide range of equipment that we can use to recover marks from the crime scene and from pieces of evidence. So, we have the capability to visualise marks using physical techniques like fingerprint powder and chemical techniques as well, in order to enhance and develop the mark using a variety of different forensic light sources that we have available here.

Katherine: Here in the DNA facility, we've got the latest DNA equipment from the vortexes and centrifuges right through to DNA amplification machines, DNA spectrophotometers to quantify the DNA, where we can take any sample, human or animal, from extraction through to processing, analysis and interpretation.

Dan: The facilities we have here at the University of Portsmouth are based in Victoria House. The crime scene facilities are designed for students to come into and immerse themselves in some very authentic looking rooms, that we can recreate all aspects of a scene or scenario that the lecturers may come up with. The idea basically being they get a full on immersive session for a good two or three hours, where they can really put to use the skills and the information given as part of the other parts of the course. Once they've done that, they go away and think about it and then they come back again to further enhance what they've learned on other parts of the course as they go through the years.

Katherine: All of our facilities are open to all of our students both undergraduate and postgraduate. They use them in classes, and they can use them for their dissertation research, so they get lots of experience with all the different techniques, all the different pieces of equipment for wherever they want to go.