Heather Walsh-Haney, Ph.D., earned her bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from the University of Florida where she trained within the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory for over a decade. In 2005, she joined the faculty at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) where she is currently an Associate Professor and Chair for the Department of Justice Studies. While working as a FGCU scholar-practitioner, she has conducted forensic anthropology casework involving discovery, recovery, and laboratory analysis for 14 Florida Medical Examiner Districts. She has consulted on over 1,200 forensic anthropology cases from Florida, California, Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Georgia. She has traveled to Bermuda, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Guatemala, and Fiji for international casework. Dr. Walsh-Haney has been an expert witness in the United States and abroad for cases involving capital murder, gender violence, child abuse, and feminicide. As a member of the Department of Health and Human Services Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) she participated in recovery operations related to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks and hurricanes Wilma and Katrina. As a member of the Florida Disaster Mortuary Operations Response System (FEMORS), she also assisted during the 2021 Surfside building collapse.

Dr. Walsh-Haney has served as a principal and co-investigator in numerous research projects, authored multiple publications, and presented at national and international conferences. Her research expertise includes the interpretation of skeletal morphology to (1) aid in identification; (2) trauma analysis to assist the medical examiner/coroner in the determinate of cause and manner of death; 3) postmortem change to estimate time since death/deposition and delineate search areas. Her practical and research-based experiences have helped judicial systems convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent.

Through Dr. Walsh-Haney’s interest in pedagogy and STEM education, she conducts classroom research into the efficacy of inquiry based and flipped classroom learning in K-12 and college classrooms. As faculty at the National Forensic Academy, she teaches pertinent forensic techniques in anthropology, archaeology and osteology to law enforcement officers from both national and international agencies. By understanding the science of teaching, she transcends the classroom by bring those skills into the courtroom with respect to her expert witness testimony.