About Us
Throughout the year, the CRIM team does a variety of tasks, including:
- Archival research to establish likely locations of missing service members.
- Work in the GIS Lab, where we use historical and modern data in the creation of customized maps that can inform and assist researchers in the field.
- Investigations of potential sites in the field. This includes examining the potential site for material evidence and interviewing locals for information about the incident.
- Excavation of sites, upon approval by DPAA.
- Developing specialized UAVs and anomaly detection technology to assist in site identification and recovery efforts.
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UIC and the Military
The University of Illinois at Chicago was founded in response to an overwhelming demand for higher education by returning World War II servicemembers. The GI Bill was introduced in 1944, and two years later, the University of Illinois had 23,000 students hoping to register–an 80% increase from the previous year. To quickly find space for new students, UIC was initially placed at Navy Pier on Lake Michigan, one of the country’s major naval schools during the war. Seventy five percent of UIC’s first graduating class were World War II veterans.
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The Aircraft Crash Survivor Behavior Project
In March of 2022, the CRIM team was awarded a $25,000 Chancellor’s Translational Research Initiative grant from UIC Innovation to develop our database of aircraft crash survivor behavior and to develop artificial intelligence to predict behavior based on this database. In December of 2022 we were awarded a $50,000 Proof of Concept Award, to further develop this work. Our goal is to improve search and recovery efforts not only for aircraft crash survivors but ultimately for any individuals lost in the wild, thus broadly furthering the CRIM mission.
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