Last month, Dr. Eric B. Emery joined the National Transportation Safety Board as a Coordinator for Medicolegal Operations with the Transportation Disaster Assistance Division.  Dr. Emery, an experienced anthropologist has conducted mass fatality investigation and recovery operations in Iraq, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, South Korea, Papua New Guinea, Palau, as well as throughout Europe.

Three weeks after arriving at the Safety Board, Dr. Emery launched with the go-team to a motorcoach accident near Doswell, Virginia, shadowing Elias Kontanis, his counterpart in Medicolegal Operations for TDA.  “At this point, my goal is to carefully observe the processes and to fully understand how TDA fits within the larger mission of the NTSB.” 

 Prior to joining the Safety Board, Dr. Emery worked for nearly a decade in medicolegal operations as a human remains recovery leader for the Department of Defense’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command-Central Identification Laboratory (JPAC-CIL).  In 2005, he graduated from the U.S. Navy’s Center for Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Diving (CEODD) on Ford Island, Hawaii, and in 2007 received his surface-supplied diver qualification from the U.S. Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC) in Panama City, Florida.  He then served as the manager of JPAC-CIL’s underwater human remains recovery operations, working in conjunction with salvage dive teams from both the U.S. Navy and Army. 

Since 1993, Dr. Emery has been actively involved in land and underwater human remains recovery work.  In addition to developing interagency and international training programs in forensics and mass fatality recoveries, he collaborated, for five years, with the Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) in Bogota, Colombia.

Dr. Emery received his PhD in anthropology from Texas A&M University.  He is a Diplomat of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and an active member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and the Register of Professional Archaeologists.  He has also consulted for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Forensic Sciences Working Group.