Simon Cole is the director and associate editor of the National Registry of Exonerations and a professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine, where he teaches Miscarriages of Justice, among other courses. His primary research area is the sociology and history of forensic science, and he has published on forensic science and on miscarriages of justice. He is the author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Harvard University Press, 2001) and Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (University of Chicago Press, 2008, with Michael Lynch, Ruth McNally & Kathleen Jordan).​