The pain of losing a friend or a family member can be devastating, but it is profoundly different from learning that a loved one is missing and may never be found.
“It’s called ambiguous loss,” said Sherry Fox, an assistant teaching professor in The School of Interdisciplinary Forensics at Arizona State University. “And it’s a horrible thing.”
Fox, a recent recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award, has spent decades of her life searching for missing people and identifying human remains after wars or natural disasters worldwide.
Now, she is working with other ASU faculty members to help families trapped in the uncertainty of this kind of loss. She and Tricia Redeker Hepner, a professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, have combined their expertise to create the Humanitarian Forensics Hub on ASU’s West Valley campus.
The New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences will celebrate the launch of the hub with a conference from Oct. 16–17. Humanitarian Forensics: Advocating for the Living, the Dead, and the Missing in Arizona and Beyond will take place on ASU’s West Valley campus and online.
The conference will feature presenters representing more than 19 countries and 50 institutions, offering perspectives on challenges that cross geographic and disciplinary boundaries.
More and more missing
According to Fox, there are more than 130 ongoing conflicts in the world today.
“It's a huge problem, and it's a growing problem,” she said. “With disasters not only gaining in number but also in intensity, we're having more and more people moving than any other time in history, and that means more people going missing.”
The Humanitarian Forensics Hub will advance methods for finding missing people, identifying the unidentified and returning loved ones to their families and communities. Its mission reflects the broader field of humanitarian forensics, which brings scientific investigation together with ethical, cultural and legal approaches, grounded in a core principle of international humanitarian law, which states that families have the right to know the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones.
“It's not simply a domestic criminal investigation — (that is) looking for missing and murdered people and identifying them for criminal proceedings,” said Redeker Hepner, who has visited Uganda 11 times, using forensic archaeology techniques alongside oral histories of survivors to exhume and rebury remains in accordance with local tradition.
“We're really working on humanitarian goals to help families resolve the loss and the trauma that is left when a person has disappeared or their remains are not identified and returned to their families.”
The hub organizers hope it will provide a centralized place for students, researchers, practitioners, advocates and affected families and communities to explore how forensic science and interdisciplinary collaboration can advance dignity, justice and accountability for the missing, dead and disappeared.
“A lot of the great work is being done in this space but it is very fragmented at the moment,” said Sara Fatula, an instructor in The School of Interdisciplinary Forensics who is affiliated with the hub. “There's not a lot of communication across these different sectors. So the hope is that this hub will provide a centralized place to facilitate collaboration among all of these different stakeholders.”
Fatula added that including family and community members of the missing makes a difference in the pursuit of justice for the dead: “They have forced science, have forced accountability. A lot of the innovation that's taken place is actually stemmed from the demands by families."
A cause that's close to home
Although the Humanitarian Forensics Hub will create a place for global collaboration in addressing humanitarian issues around missing people and unidentified bodies, its work carries particular urgency in Arizona.
According to the June 2026 NamUs biannual report, Arizona had 1,101 unresolved missing-person cases, placing it fifth nationally among states and territories. The report listed Arizona among the highest states for unidentified remains, with 2,151 unidentified-person cases.
Many factors converge to create this deadly situation.
“Part of it is the climate,” Redeker Hepner said. “The terrain is unforgiving. If you get lost in the desert, there’s a good chance you may not make it out. The desert is also a vast, inhospitable place where people may go missing or be abducted and murdered and never heard from again.”
Arizona’s location along a major migration corridor deepens the crisis, she said.
“It’s the physical geography of where we sit in the U.S. relative to a major migration corridor,” Redeker Hepner said. “That, combined with policies that create what’s called the funnel effect, pushed undocumented migrants into the most inhospitable terrain because they don’t have legal or safer crossing pathways.”
The Grand Canyon state has more than 20 million acres of Indigenous land, more than any other state in the nation, and ranks among the highest in the U.S. for missing Indigenous individuals, placing second or third depending on the year’s NamUs dataset. Arizona has also ranked No. 1 nationally for unidentified deceased people with tribal affiliation, with 42 cases in recent federal snapshots.
This creates complex jurisdictional webs between tribal, federal, state and local law enforcement, which can lead to critical delays in investigating missing person cases.
Gabriella Soto, an associate teaching professor and Honors Faculty Fellow in ASU’s Barrett, The Honors College whose recent book “Border Afterlives” explores issues surrounding migrant deaths, says that “especially for people who die under suspicious circumstances, such as mass casualty events, if the forensic investigation doesn't go through, if we don't identify the person, if we don't determine how they died, it can be a really torturous process” for the family and friends.
Republished courtesy of Arizona State University