Meet the team

Dr. Ashlyn Kuersten is a Professor in the Criminal Justice Studies Program at Western Michigan University (WMU). Her research has focused exclusively on U.S. constitutional law;  she has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Justice.  She is the recipient of the 2023 Professional Excellence Award from the Michigan State Police-5th District.

Dr. Kuersten has advised over 40 state universities and their state police agencies to help create similar programs to the WMU Cold Case Program. She also works with law firms and prosecutors to help determine best practices in organizing massive databases and case files. 

She has won numerous teaching awards both at her university and nationally.  Her work has been featured on the New York Times, Today Show, 48 Hours, NBC News and People Magazine.

Dr. Patrick Cundiff is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at WMU. Dr. Cundiff has published works in refereed journals on criminology, criminal justice, and social psychology.  Dr. Cundiff's research interests tend to be wide ranging including: birth order and crime, the effects of incarceration on future employment, characteristics of sexual assault, the impact of expectations of the future on offending, homicide trends over time, criminal justice education, prisoner re-entry, and police personality. He has worked on sponsored research for criminal justice agencies and local municipalities, leading to the production of professional reports and other grant funding and allocations. 

D/Sgt. (Ret) Suarez retired from MSP in 2024. He served 12 years in the Michigan Army National Guard and received a bachelor's degree in human resources and organizational development from Spring Arbor University. He has completed numerous leadership programs through the United States Army and the Michigan State Police.  He was responsible for overseeing major investigations and mentoring sergeants and troopers throughout ongoing criminal investigations.  In this role, he was assigned as a task force member on other major investigations involving public corruption, homicides, and officer-involved shootings to name a few.  His efforts as part of the cold case task force were instrumental in the successful prosecution of a cold case homicide involving a serial offender responsible for at least four murders.  He spent approximately 13 years as a road trooper, and then was assigned to the Southwest Enforcement Team (SWET) as a narcotics investigator.  He also served 3 years as an interdiction officer on the Hometown Security Team (HST) for MSP's 5th district and 1 year in a newly created role on the Tobacco Tax Enforcement Team (TTET).  At that time, he was promoted back to SWET as the D/Sergeant and supervised a multi-jurisdictional team made of members from MSP as well as members from several non-MSP support agencies.  Investigations on this team ranged from street level narcotics dealing to international drug trafficking organizations. After 7 years in this role, D/Sgt (Ret) transferred to the 5th district Special Investigations Section.  D/Sgt. Suarez was awarded the Public Safety Officer of the Year in the state of Michigan in 2024 by the VFW, as well as a life saving award in 2019.

D/F/Lt. Chuck Christensen is a Michigan native and a 1993 graduate of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Upon graduation he enlisted with the United States Border Patrol, graduated from the 279th session and served on United States border in Brownsville, Texas as a federal agent. In September of 1995 D/F/Lt. Christensen enlisted with the Michigan State Police and graduated as a member of the 113th Recruit School. D/F/Lt. Christensen has held the following positions within the department: road trooper, trooper investigator at the South Haven Post, trooper investigator, detective sergeant, team leader and the commanding officer of the Fifth District Cold Case Team. He has also held the positions of uniform sergeant and post commander at the Battle Creek and Paw Paw Posts. He currently commands the Fifth District Special Investigation Section comprised of the District Fugitive Team, Hometown Security Team, District Cold Case Team, District Crime Prevention Squad, and post detective sergeants in southwest Michigan.

Dr. Dogan is a MSc. Engineer Geophysicist and received her PhD. at Michigan State University in 2013. She is interested in near surface applications of geophysical methods for solving forensic-, environment- and groundwater-related problems. High resolution, novel, and non-destructive geophysical methods constitute the majority of the tools she uses for her research. Additionally, she works on high resolution flow-transport models, artificial neural network algorithms and inversion problems of EM methods of geophysics. Dr. Dogan specializes in environmental/near surface geophysics and is responsible for bringing the new drone-mounted geophysical systems to WMU. She teaches for her department's certificate program in UAVs Applications in Geological and Environmental Sciences, graduate and undergraduate level field camp, geophysics and computational methods courses, and is developing a Geo forensics course for the upcoming academic year.   

Dr. Dogan has worked extensively with the WMU Cold Case Program utilizing her ground penetrating radar in various cold missing-person cases around Michigan.

Professor Bradford Dennis has been an Education and Human Development Librarian at WMU since 2002. He supported the planning and successful opening of the Swain Education Library and served as head of this branch. He then moved into an instruction and outreach role in 2018. He is known on campus for his work with LibQUAL, a national assessment survey of academic libraries that WMU has participated in every three years since 2004. He previously served as WMU's University Assessment Steering Committee chair and received a Western Assessment Excellence Award. 

Dennis's background in libraries and historical research has been utilized extensively by WMU’s Cold Case Program, providing insight into resources that can help illuminate decades-old unsolved cases. He has collaborated with the program on four cases, including the Roxanne Wood cold case murder recently solved by Michigan State Police. Learn more about Dennis' work with the Program here.

Dennis’ research and publication interests include academic library assessment, information literacy instruction, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.  Graduating with honors in 1994, Dennis is a WMU alumnus and received a post-graduate secondary education teaching certificate from the State of Michigan. In 2001, he received his Master of Library and Information Science Degree with the highest honors from Wayne State University.