Theresa Woltanski became hooked on forensic anthropology late in her college career at GVSU. She is now working with the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii (CILHI) in the complex job of finding and identifying human remains. Her work supports her facility's promise to American servicemen missing in action that they are Not To Be Forgotten.
After graduating from Grand Valley in 1989, she pursued an advanced degree in anthropology from the University of Tennessee, where she worked in the university's anthropological research facility, Forensic Investigation Team, and Contract Archaeology Laboratory. She also worked with the Knoxville Police Department Crime Lab, gathering evidence and lifting fingerprints. In 1995, Woltanski worked with the local medical examiner's office to help identify people who died in the Branch-Davidian disaster in Waco, Texas.
She took her current position with CILHI as a forensic anthropologist at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu in 1993, did a stint in Texas for 10 months, then returned to Hawaii in 1996.
The lab is responsible for finding, repatriating and identifying the remains of servicemen lost in the various conflicts in which the U.S. has been involved, mainly in World War II, the Korean War, Cold War and Vietnam, she says. We may be in the field 30-60 days at a time, excavating crash sites or isolated burials.
Woltanski usually works as a member of a team consisting of an anthropologist, a team captain, a senior sergeant, mortuary affairs personnel, a medic, an explosive ordnance disposal technician, a linguist and an expert in aircraft wreckage.
Although some of CILHI'S work is limited by jurisdictional constraints, Woltanski allows that fate sometimes positions them in the right place at the right time.
In 1997, I was working with a team excavating a World War II crash site on Guam, when Korean Airlines Flight 801 crashed on Nimitz Hill, she says. I was the first forensic anthropologist on the scene and continued to work, both on scene and in the temporary morgue, for the next ten days. My team helped on the scene for a week, and CILHI sent several other anthropologists and a forensic odontologist to help other federal disaster teams in the morgue.
Woltanski and her colleagues use the most highly advanced technology in their work, and can now identify remains that previously would remain unidentified. She cites new and sophisticated techniques such as mitochondrial DNA testing, which samples DNA found outside cell nuclei and is more easily recovered from bones and dental remains.
I have a sense of service about my work with the Army, she says. There is satisfaction in sending someone home to their family after years in a jungle in Southeast Asia or a European forest. Although I try not to get emotional about my work in the lab, I do have a sense of patriotism.
Woltanski's professional skills and willingness to perform an often gruesome and arduous mission have brought her to the top of her profession. Her work has helped bring some closure to family members of American servicemen and others whose loved one's remains have been returned to them.
