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The Brother Lucian Blersch Endowment and the School of Natural Sciences at St. Edward's University present
Friday, September 19, 2025
Carter Auditorium of John Brooks Williams Science Center South
8:50 am: Welcome by Dean Jonathan Hodge, School of Natural Sciences
9:00 am: “Running Prostheses and the Olympics”
Owen Beck, PhD, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Kinesiology and Health Education, University of Texas at Austin
10:00 am: “Count on Statistics for Investigation and Decision-Making”
Kimberly F. Sellers, PhD, Department Head and Professor, Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University
11:00 am: “Medical Legal Death Investigations and Forensics”
Graham S. Hetrick, MS, FD, BCFE, County Coroner, Medical/Legal Investigator, Forensic Consultant and Trainer, Forensic Reconstruction
2:00-3:30 pm: Student Poster Session, John Brooks Williams North, First Floor. Link to Abstracts.
2024 Speakers
Owen Beck, Ph.D.
Owen Beck is an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin. His overall research goal is to improve human walking and running performance. This affinity for human performance began during his undergraduate studies at Humboldt State University (B.S. in Kinesiology). As a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder, he studied how prosthetic configuration affects running economy and sprinting speed in athletes with leg amputations (Ph.D. in Integrative Physiology). This graduate research led to Dr. Beck's involvement in two international court cases regarding the eligibility of athletes with limb amputations in Olympic track and field. As a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Dr. Beck studied how exoskeletons affect muscle-tendon mechanics during walking, running and reactive balance.
Kimberly F. Sellers, Ph.D.
Kimberly F. Sellers, is the Head and Professor of the Statistics Department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Her primary research interests and expertise center on statistical methods for count data that contain data dispersion with methodological interests in distribution theory, regression analysis, multivariate analysis, stochastic processes, and time series analysis. She authored the book, The Conway-Maxwell-Poisson Distribution (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which is the first comprehensive reference on the distribution and the flexible statistical methods derived using it to analyze dispersed count data. Dr. Sellers is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Fellow in both the American Statistical Association and the Association for Women in Mathematics, respectively, in recognition of her research, and active contributions in service to the discipline.
A Washington, DC-area native, Dr. Sellers completed her BS and MA degrees in Mathematics at the University of Maryland College Park, and obtained her PhD in Mathematical Statistics at The George Washington University. She held previous faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Georgetown University. She recently concluded a secondary appointment as a Principal Researcher with the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology Division of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Graham S. Hetrick, M.S., FD., B.C.F.E.
Graham S. Hetrick has served as the Coroner of Dauphin County for over 35 years, with a remarkable background that includes serving in the 385th Military Police and the 52nd CID during the Vietnam era in the U.S. Army. He’s a graduate of York College of Pennsylvania and holds a master’s degree from Cabrini University, with extensive studies in forensic science, including training at the renowned Tennessee Body Farm. He has conducted approximately 8,000 scene investigations and thousands of additional cases. He was also a professor at Harrisburg University, where he worked with Dr. Robert Furey in establishing the forensic program at the university. He’s widely recognized for his role on a popular Investigation Discovery TV show, where his expertise continues to captivate audiences.
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