Giovanna Vidoli is the Director of the Forensic Anthropology Center. Prior to becoming Director in July 2025, she was the Forensic Anthropology Center (FAC) Research Associate Professor where she was a PI or co-PI on 7 National Institute of Justice grants. Dr. Vidoli also coordinated and provided external trainings in forensic anthropological and archaeological methods for national and international law enforcement, federal agents, and college students. Prior to moving to Knoxville in 2013, Dr. Vidoli received her PhD from SUNY Binghamton. She also was a co-instructor for forensic anthropological and archaeological short-courses in Bogota, Colombia, with the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) between 2010 and 2012. Prior to her PhD, Dr. Vidoli was the Assistant Director of World Trade Center Operations from 2004-2006 where she led a team of analysts for final victim verification.

Research

Giovanna Vidoli’s dissertation research focused on population distances and geopolitical landscape of Mississippian populations in the Middle Cumberland Region, Tennessee. Much of her work experience is in mass fatality recoveries and identifications. Prior to obtaining her PhD, she volunteered in Guatemala with the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) team, aided in the preservation of remains of victims from the World Trade Center September 11, 2001, attacks, and also aided in mortuary operations during the recovery of victims of the Boxing Day Tsunami in Thailand. She has worked with family members of mass fatality victims communicating daily with World Trade Center families in her role as Assistant Director of World Trade Center Operations at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, New York.

In addition to working in Thailand and Guatemala, she taught short courses in osteology and archaeology in Bogota’ Colombia to forensic anthropologists, odontologists, and pathologists. She also was a Fellow with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command-Central Identification Laboratory (JPAC-CIL) where she was on a recovery team in Laos. Her current research focuses on comparing decomposition rates of humans as related to pigs and rabbits; recording fracture patterns of airline crash victims; and identification modalities for skeletal remains including estimating the error rates in craniofacial superimposition and ancestry estimation.

Publications

• 2012 Worne, H., C.R. Cobb. G.M. Vidoli. and D.W. Steadman The Space of War: connecting geophysical landscapes with skeletal evidence or warfare-related trauma.  In Martin. Harrod, and Perez (Eds.) The Bioarchaeology of Violence University Press of Florida
• 2012 Vidoli, G.M. and Mundorff, A.Z. “Victim Fragmentation Patterns and Seat Location Supplements Crash Data: American Airlines Flight 587” Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 83(4):412-417
• 2006 A. Mundorff, G. Vidoli, J. Melinek “Anthropological and Radiographic Comparison of Vertebrae for Identification of Decomposed Human Remains“. In Journal of Forensic Sciences 51(5): 1002–1004