Clea Koff
Clea Koff is a forensic anthropologist who worked for many years for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal to Rwanda (ICTR) and the War Crime Tribunal in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. As a twenty-three-year-old graduate student studying prehistoric skeletons in Berkeley, California she 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. She has captured the events of her time in Rwanda, Bosnia and Croatia 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 and Canada, in 2005 in France and Denmark, and 2006 in Norway and Italy.
Clea Koff was born 1973 as the daughter of a Tanzanian mother and an American father, both documentary filmmakers focused on human rights issues. Her parents took her and her older brother, Jimera, with them around the world and 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, first in Washington and later in Los Angeles. In Stanford she studied anthropology and than decided to concentrate on forensics. She completed her degree in 1999 at the University of Nebraska after she combind her studies with working for the UN between 1996 and 1999.
She 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".