Dr. Jennie Jin joined the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) in 2010 right before she received her Ph.D. from Penn State. She has been leading the Korean War Identification Project since then, which became one of the largest and most successful projects in the agency producing hundreds of identifications of the missing US servicemembers from Korea. In addition to being a biological anthropologist, Dr. Jin has been at the center of international diplomacy working as part of the U.S. negotiating team with North Korea to arrange for the repatriation of the skeletal remains of U.S. soldiers. As a native Korean speaker, Dr. Jin has played an important role in various negotiations and coordination with the South Korean government arranging US-South Korea recovery and forensic review missions.
Dr. Jin’s work and interviews were featured in numerous articles including NPR, Times, and Voice of America.
Dr. Jin enjoys writing books and articles for general audience. Her single-authored book “Bone tells stories” (in Korean) received numerous national awards and is currently on the 11th print since 2015. Her articles appeared in major media outlets in Korea. She continues to teach upper division undergraduate anthropology courses at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dr. Jin lives in Honolulu with her anthropologist husband and two beautiful daughters.
