Roos conducted her PhD research at the University of Amsterdam in light of the ERC funded Race Matter: The Absent Presence of Race in Forensic Identification project (https://race-face-id.eu/), led by Prof. dr. Amade M’charek. Her research focused on race and technologies used to predict appearance traits (such as the shape of the face, eye- and haircolor, or biogeographical ancestry) from DNA material retrieved from crime scenes. These forensic DNA phenotyping or FDP technologies can generate new clues in criminal cases that have hit a dead end, or can be used to corroborate eyewitness accounts. Roos Hopman ethnographically studied how race became relevant in FDP technologies: whereas geneticists were not interested in race as an analytical category and avoided it in speech, she focused on how it emerged in particular practices. Her thesis as such took race as an absent presence, both there and not there. Moving away from what geneticists said about race to focus on what they did, in her thesis Roos traced practices surrounding FDP in (forensic) laboratories to analyze how race was enacted in practice.
After her PhD Roos received a Rubicon grant from the Dutch Research Council for a postdoctoral fellowship at a prestigious institution in the US, but she forsook the maple forests of New England in the name of natural history and Berlin. She furthermore worked as a research assistant and a supervisor in the NWO funded Electoral Contention and Violence Project (https://ecavdata.org/).
Publications
Roos Hopman, Facing Genetics. An Ethnography of Race in Forensic DNA Phenotyping Practices (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2022),
https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1....
Roos Hopman, Irene van Oorschot and Amade M’charek, “From Promise to Practice: Anticipatory Work and the Adoption of Massively Parallel Sequencing in Forensics,” in The Law and International Forensic DNA Profiling: Exploring Practices and Politics of Technolegal Worlds, ed. Victor Toom, Matthias Wienroth and Amade M’charek (London: Routledge) (forthcoming), http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.....
Roos Hopman, “The Face as Folded Object: Race and the Problems with ‘Progress’ in Forensic DNA Phenotyping,” Social Studies of Science (2021), https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0306....
Roos Hopman and Amade M’charek, “Facing the Unknown Suspect: Forensic DNA Phenotyping and the Oscillation Between the Individual and the Collective,” BioSocieties no. 15 (2020), 438–462, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292...
Roos Hopman, “Opening Up Forensic DNA Phenotyping: the Logics of Accuracy, Commonality and Valuing,” New Genetics and Society 39, no. 4 (2020), 424–440, https://doi.org/10.1080/146367....