D. Kim Rossmo

D. Kim Rossmo is a Canadian criminologist, born in 1955 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who joined the Vancouver Police Department in 1978 and became, in 1995, the first police officer in Canada to hold a doctorate in criminology. His doctoral research at Simon Fraser University produced geographic profiling, an investigative methodology that applies a mathematical formula to the locations of a linked series of crimes to help identify the likely area where an offender lives or bases operations, later commercialized as the Rigel software system through a company he co-founded. His 1998 analysis of a pattern among missing sex trade workers in Vancouver anticipated the case later resolved by the arrest and conviction of serial killer Robert Pickton, and he went on to hold an endowed chair in criminology at Texas State University, where he directs the Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation and has extended geographic profiling techniques to counterterrorism, epidemiology and wildlife biology.