TAMIU Prof Receives Honorary Lectureship in Scotland; Research Efforts Focus on Facial Recognition and Human Identification

Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) associate professor of Psychology Dr. Kate Houston was recently awarded an Honorary Lectureship position at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, School of Science and Engineering at the University of Dundee in Scotland, UK.

This honorary position was granted in recognition of Dr. Houston’s contributions to the University of Dundee’s forensic facial reconstruction graduate programs.

Houston began working with the Center for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee in 2009 while a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. 

Her work focused on eyewitness memory, specifically how emotions interact with our ability to recognize faces and remember events. There, she worked with graduate students who were learning how to forensically reconstruct a human face when remains that were found to be too skeletonized for immediate visual identification were found.

As a doctoral student, she organized a two-day conference that included face recognition experts and stakeholders in the criminal justice system, these were psychologists, forensic anthropologists, police officers, attorneys, and judges. 

“I was fascinated at the science behind taking a human skull and reconstructing a face to aid identification.  The following year, the University of Dundee invited me to give a guest lecture to their graduate students in forensic art about the psychology of forensic face recognition and eyewitness testimony.  That was in 2010, and I have now given a guest lecture there every year. 2025 will be my 15th year,” said Houston.  

Upon the completion of her PhD and moving to Texas to pursue a post-doctoral position at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Center for Anatomy and Human Identification asked if she would continue to provide her guest lectures remotely. 

“I continued to collaborate with Dundee throughout my post-doc and then throughout my tenure-track and tenured career here at TAMIU.  I feel extremely honored by the University of Dundee’s recognition of my work in this area. I am excited by the opportunities these international connections will bring to our students here at TAMIU,” Houston emphasized.

This honorary position will allow Houston to have greater advisory roles as the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification continue their research in the fields of Generative Artificial Intelligence and face recognition and to serve on their master’s and doctoral students’ committees.

Houston noted the importance of this work especially for research taking place within border regions.

“A sad reality of life along the U.S./México border is that skeletonized and decomposing human remains are often found without identifying documents in the uninhabited lands around our border. In the time between 2018 through 2022, the United States Border Patrol recorded 2,298 deaths along the Southwest Sector of the U.S./México border.  There is no publicly available data on the proportion of those deaths which were recorded as skeletonized or otherwise unrecognizable human remains,” Houston explained.

Houston noted the introduction of Texas’ Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act in 2019, which sought to support government agencies, medical examiners' offices, universities, and humanitarian organizations to work collaboratively to aid in the identification and repatriation of unidentified human remains.

“In 2022, I along with my TAMIU colleague in Anthropology Dr. Alison Hadley, secured a TAMIU Presidential Innovation Grant to investigate these issues and launch the Center for the Study of Undocumented Border Crossers,” Houston explained.

Together, the researchers published their first paper in Violence: An International Journal, titled “On the Trail of Missing Border Crossers in Webb County, Texas.”

“Developing science-based techniques to assist in the identification of human remains along our borderland aids in the moral and ethical pursuit of reducing humanitarian crises, bringing closure to families missing loved ones, providing innovative training and research opportunities to our students and working together with our government agencies to help alleviate the bottlenecks they face,” Houston noted.  

She continued, “We are at a very early stage in our project here at TAMIU, but with this Honorary Lectureship at the Center for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee in Scotland I am excited to further the international nature of our research effort.”

For more information, contact Dr. Houston by emailing kate.houston@tamiu.edu.

More on the University’s story can also be found at tamiu.edu and on the University’s social media channels, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X-Twitter, and YouTube.