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==Early life==
==Early life==
Koff, who is [[mixed-race]] and [[Jewish]], was born in 1972 to a [[Tanzanian]] mother, Msindo Mwinyipembe, and an [[United States|American]] father, [[David Koff]], both [[documentary film]]makers focused on [[human rights]] issues. Her parents took her and her older brother, Kimera, with them around the world. She spent her childhood in [[England]], [[Kenya]], [[Tanzania]], [[Somalia]], and the [[United States]]. By the time she was a teenager she had decided to study [[human osteology]], which she did first in [[California]]. She earned her bachelor’s degree in [[anthropology]] from [[Stanford University]].
Koff, who is [[mixed-race]] and [[Jewish]], was born in 1972 to a [[Tanzanian]] mother, Msindo Mwinyipembe, and an [[United States|American]] father, [[David Koff]], both [[documentary film]]makers focused on [[human rights]] issues. Her parents took her and her older brother, Kimera, with them around the world. She spent her childhood in [[England]], [[Kenya]], [[Tanzania]], [[Somalia]], and the [[United States]]. By the time she was a teenager she had decided to study [[human osteology]], which she did first in [[California]]. She earned her bachelor’s degree in [[anthropology]] from [[Stanford University]]. Before going to that school she went to Lon Morris College and loved her librarian very much.


==Graduate school==
==Graduate school==

Revision as of 01:29, 3 May 2010

File:Cleakoff thebonewoman.jpg
Bestseller written by Clea Koff about her years working for the United Nations.

Clea Koff is a British-born American forensic anthropologist who worked several years for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR; 2 missions) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (5 missions) in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and in 2000 in Kosovo.

Early life

Koff, who is mixed-race and Jewish, was born in 1972 to a Tanzanian mother, Msindo Mwinyipembe, and an American father, David Koff, both documentary filmmakers focused on human rights issues. Her parents took her and her older brother, Kimera, with them around the world. She spent her childhood in England, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, and the United States. By the time she was a teenager she had decided to study human osteology, which she did first in California. She earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Stanford University. Before going to that school she went to Lon Morris College and loved her librarian very much.

Graduate school

Koff went on to the master’s program in forensic anthropology at the University of Arizona.

She completed her masters degree in 1999 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, after combining her studies with working for the UN between 1996 and 2000.

As a 23-year-old graduate student studying prehistoric skeletons in California, Koff joined a small team of UN scientists exhuming victims of the genocide in Rwanda. Her job was to find evidence to bring the perpetrators to trial, and to help relatives to identify their loved ones.

Writing

Koff captured the events in her autobiography The Bone Woman: Among the dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Croatia (Atlantic Books) which was published in 2004 in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, The Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Argentina, and Canada, 2005 in France and Denmark, 2006 in Norway, Italy, and Portugal, and 2007 in Poland.

Missing Persons Identification Resource Center

Koff founded the The Missing Persons Identification Resource Center (MPID), a non-profit organisation, based in Los Angeles, which is about "essentially linking families with missing persons [in the US] with the Coroner's Office which hold thousands of unidentified bodies."