Nicholas D. K. Petraco

Nicholas D. K. Petraco is a Professor at the Department of Sciences, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY). His research focuses on statistical pattern recognition applied to forensic trace evidence, quantum chemical computations, and data mining of crime databases. He holds a PhD in Quantum Chemistry from the University of Georgia (2002) and a BA in Chemistry from Colgate University (1998).

His expertise includes methodologies for analyzing toolmarks, soils, footwear, gunshot residue, and instrumentation data from contaminated samples. He also develops computational tools in R for surface metrology analysis, as evidenced by his GitHub repositories like x3pr for processing 3D surface data.

Petraco’s work bridges chemistry, statistics, and forensic science, with contributions to forensic databases and computational forensics. His lab is located in the New Building, 5th Floor, at John Jay College.