Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Ph.D.

Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Ph.D., is a computational biologist and anthropologist, whose research interrogates the hierarchies of identity ingrained within our immigration, medical, and legal systems and explores their relationships to displacement, poverty, and violence among marginalized communities, especially in transborder spaces of the U.S. and across Latin America.  As a data scientist, she develops new computational techniques in ML, AI, and NLP to decompose complex patterns of human biology and behavior at scale, building models that leverage genetic, skeletal, linguistic, life-history, and social-context information to shed light on past and present histories.  As a forensic biologist, she studies how skeletal and genetic traits vary among contemporary peoples across space and through time to help her identify missing and unknown persons, providing forensic casework support especially along La Frontera. She also delivers expert testimony for asylum petitions and policy.

Algee-Hewitt has published extensively on the crisis of deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border and among vulnerable communities in Latin America, the technical estimation of biological parameters in archeological and forensic contexts, and the application of NLP to questions of code-switching and racialized language in public, social media, industry, academic, educational, legal, policy, and business discourse. Her recent volumes include The Reality of the Dead in Brazil (2023), Changing the Landscape of Identity in Forensic Anthropology (2022), and Remodeling Forensic Skeletal Age (2021).

Bridget Algee-Hewitt is a passionate advocate for refugee and immigrant rights, initiatives to improve justice response for the disappeared, and trauma resources for survivors of human trafficking and exploitation in the U.S.