Dr. Naomi Kaplan-Damary is a lecturer in criminology at the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received all three of her degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her doctoral thesis is: "Statistical Methods for Evaluating Forensic Evidence". Naomi completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Irvine, USA as a CSAFE (Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence) fellow. Her areas of interest include: various issues in forensic science, especially strengthening its scientific basis, the impact of the way forensic evidence is presented on its perception in court, cognitive biases in the legal system, and false convictions.
Dr. Kaplan-Damary is engaged in the practical applications of her research in collaboration with the Israel Police and the Public Defender's Office, and is involved in formulating recommendations to improve the working methods of forensic investigators. She is a member of several OSAC (Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science) monitoring committees that are currently formulating new procedures for examining forensic evidence in various fields. She is also active in CSAFE and serves as the principal investigator in a study on its behalf, "Estimating the Probability of RAC Location on a Shoe Sole" conducted in collaboration with the Israel Police with the support of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), which is responsible for improving forensic evidence analysis methods in the US.
Education
2018-2021 – Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Irvine, Department of Statistics. Supervisor: Prof. Hal Stern
2013-2018 – Doctor (Ph.D.) in Statistics, Hebrew University, Department of Statistics.Supervisors: Prof. Micha Mandel and Dr. Yoram Yekutieli
2010-2012 – M.A. in Statistics, cum laude, Hebrew University, Department of Statistics. Supervisor: Prof. Micha Mandel
2006-2010 – B.A. in Economics and Statistics, Hebrew University, Department of Economics and Department of Statistics.
Publications
Kaplan-Damary, N. (2024). Evaluating Forensic Science: Insights from Schauer’s The Proof. Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrls/jlae018
Jonathan-Zamir, T., Perry, G., Kaplan-Damary, N., & Weisburd, D. (2024). Police compliance with the social contract as an antecedent of police legitimacy, of satisfaction with the police, and of willingness to obey: Findings from a two-stage vignette experiment.Journal of Experimental Criminology.doi.org/10.1007/s11292-024-09622-z
Kaplan-Damary, N., Jonathan-Zamir, T., Perry, G., & Itskovich E. (2024). Forensic Science - Believe It or Not? Public Attitudes toward Forensic Evidence in Israel.International Annals of Criminology. 62:1, 226-254. doi:10.1017/cri.2024.4
Arora, H. M., Kaplan-Damary, N. & Stern, H. S. (2024). Reliability of ordinal outcomes in forensic black-box studies.Forensic Science International, 354. doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2023.111909
Arora, H. M., Kaplan-Damary, N., & Stern, H. S. (2023). Combining reproducibility and repeatability studies with applications in forensic science.Law, probability and risk, 22:1.doi.org/10.1093/lpr/mgad007
Kaplan-Damary, N., Stern, H., Hofstein-Grady, R., and Thompson, W. (2021). Using Mixture Models to Examine Group Difference Among Jurors: An Illustration Involving the Perceived Strength of Forensic Science Evidence.Law, Probability and Risk.
Wiesner, S., Kaplan-Damary, N., Eltzner, B., & Huckemann, S. (2020). Shoeprints: the path from practice to science. In D. Banks, K. Kafadar & D. Kaye (Eds.), Handbook of Forensic Statistics. London: Taylor & Francis Ltd./CRC.
Wiesner, S., Shor, Y., Tsach, T., Kaplan-Damary, N., & Yekutieli, Y. (2019). Dataset of Digitized RACs and Their Rarity Score Analysis for Strengthening Shoeprint Evidence. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 65:3, 762-774. doi:10.1111/1556-4029.14239
Kaplan-Damary, N., Mandel, M., Wiesner, S., Yekutieli, Y., Shor, Y., & Spiegelman C. (2018). Dependence among randomly acquired characteristics on shoe prints and their features. Forensic Science International, 283, 173-179.
Kaplan-Damary, N., Mandel, M., Levin, N., and Izraeli, E. (2016). Calculation of likelihood ratios for gunshot residue evidence - statistical aspects. Law, Probability and Risk, 15:2, 107-125.