I'm Alice and I'm Brett and this is the prosecutor's legal police. Oh, Welcome back to the prosecutor's legal briefs. I'm your host Alice and I'm joined as always by my cutting edge co-host Brett.

I'm never on the cutting edge of anything Alice. I'm always behind. I'm not going to lie and tell you something that's a lie because you're not cutting edge, but you know who is?

Othrum and we have Kristen Middleman here today to talk about Othrum and also an incredible case.

They just helped solve because of their cutting edge technology.

Kristen, thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I'm going to start off really quick because I asked you this by accident before we started, but I want everyone

to know this.

I've actually wondered this for a long time, but obviously you and your husband

founded Othram Labs. What does the name Othram mean and then give a quick little background of what

Othram does for those of us who may not have heard of it before.

Absolutely but before I tell you what it means I'm going to tell you that David

founded Othram and I actually didn't believe in him for the first little bit and

I told him he had lost his mind because he so I just want to be clear and get this out there I joined him from the very beginning and I've been here working really hard on building this and it's a dream come true but it took someone really brave to say you know what we're going to completely uproot and change how forensic DNA is done and when he first told me he was going to do this I thought

no one's going to send you evidence so go get some before I come and join you. Six

years later here we are and I'm super excited but

Othram is a word from Lord of the Rings that means it's the wall that protects the city

We wanted to build a company that made the world safer and built the infrastructure to make the world safer.

If you look at the logo for Othram, you see something that might look like a wall that protects the city and Lord of the

Rings but you also see the carbon ring of life and the negative space is the

person we're identifying and so to us that's all we do here at Othram. We were purpose built in 2018 to identify victims and perpetrators from crime scenes. Nothing else. So DNA sequencing and other fields like medicine and consumer genomics, we had all been a part of for years.

Most of us here at Othram had been a part of for years.

...