In years past, West Virginia University graduate April Shea would have been a definite exception to the rule: a woman working in forensic science.

Today, she is the rule. And the microbiologist with Washington, D.C.s Armed Forces Institute of Pathology is part of a sleuthing trend thats reflected nationally and especially here at her alma mater.

As more and more women are entering the field, so, too, are they studying it at WVU .

The Forensic and Investigative Sciences Program in WVU s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences is the third largest major on campus. Most of those majors are women.

Of the nearly 500 majors in the program who hail from 35 states and five countries, 70 percent are women. Like a high-speed chase down an L.A. freeway, that number zooms to 90 percent for postgraduate students in the programShea, for example, who stayed on after earning a bachelors in biology here.

Those numbers, said Suzanne Bell, the programs director, give pause to the lingering perception that only men enter the hard sciences, given the programs emphasis on chemistry, biology, physics and the like.

The numbers, she says, simply confirm the new conventional wisdom of the whole thing.

I think were going to lead the way on this one,said Bell, a former forensic chemist with the New Mexico State Police who decided to give up the crime lab for the library when she went back to school to earn her doctorate.We offer what I call the unified packageteaching, research and service to the forensic community.

The program, meanwhile, has been hailed in the national and international media for its teaching innovations, like three completecrime scenehouses, where students work through graphically realistic scenarios depicting everything from unattended deaths to marital spats that turn into murder-suicides.

The forensic garage adjacent to those houses is where students learn how to process crimes and other events where four wheels are involved, like hit-and-run fatalities and vehicular arson.

Its world-renown faculty includes respected law professionals who kept the peace in South Africa and made forensic sense out of Sept. 11.

And the program also works in tandem with postgraduate offerings in three components of the field:

• Biometrics, which uses retina and vocal-pattern scans and other geneticsignaturesas a definitive means of personal identification

• Forensic accounting, a way to bring white-collar criminals to justice by way of the cost ledger and computer hard drive

• Criminology and Investigations, a look at sociology and anthropology attached to criminal minds while also offering a practical primer of how investigations commence, from the crime scene to the courtroom

A rigorous curriculum coupled with unique internship programs at top crime labs across the country also ensures that WVU -trained sleuths are being charged with both the book-learning and practical know-how to get results in the real world.

That body of evidence is why Bell isnt shy about dreaming big.

I really think,she said,that the next investigator or researcher who makes one of those giant breakthroughs in the field is going to be both female, and a forensic graduate of West Virginia University.

To be a graduate, students have to book passage in a program with core requirements that rival any pre-medicine curriculum.

Our programs fun and rewarding, but at the same time, its hardly easy,she said.A lot of the students dont make it. They sit at home and watch theCSIshows and think every day in class is going to be like that. You have to pay your dues first. That means bench work in the lab.

Mention theCSI showsand watch Max Houcks eyebrows arch up.

Houck is a former FBI forensic investigatorhe helped identify Pentagon victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror assault on Americawho heads WVU s research-oriented Forensic Science Initiative.

The national media quickly tapped Houck as an authority on the so-calledCSI Effectardent watchers of the sleuthing shows who want to become actual practitioners themselvesand he most recently wrote about in the July edition of Scientific Americanmagazine.

Hes technically not a fan of the prime-time dramas, saying they more often than not distort the science behind any forensic investigation, but he also acknowledges the impact of the shows that are getting better at depicting women in what he callsviable roleson the small screen.

Science-minded women are also more traditionally interested in medical research with a bent toward social justice, Houck said.

When I taught Introduction to Forensic Science to sophomores last year, 86 percent of the class was female,he said.In that class especially, I always ask why the students are therewhat their personal motivations are. I remember one of the female students saying that she could use her science educationto help more people.It was like a calling, with career options.

That student also knew she was getting a solid foundation in forensic science from WVU , Bell said.

Case in point: Shea, who watched in dismay two years ago as local investigators pored over the scene of her friends car that had been torched in his driveway.

She made note of what the investigators didnt do, which was collect DNA from bottles and cans in the garbage. She wasnt surprised when the crime went unsolved.

If it was me, I would have collected the cans,she told The Chronicle of Higher Education in a 2005 profile of the program.Theres no such thing as the perfect crime.

Thats good, fundamental police work,Bell said.Thats what we like to hear.

• WVU forensic facts*

• The program last year was featured onTrue Hollywood Storieson cable televisions E! Entertainment Network, in a segment looking at what the crime shows get rightand what they dontin prime time.

• Four students entered WVU s inaugural fingerprint degree program in 1997. Five years later, that quartet of graduates went forthand one had to miss Commencement because of a job interview at a crime lab in Arizona.

• Keith Morris, the programs deputy director, once headed South Africas national crime lab system.

• One class employs a WVU Mountaineer football helmet done out with a sponge soaked with cows blood from the agriculture school and topped by a wig. Students wail on the contraption with a baseball bat, then learn how toreadthe resulting blood spatters.

• Its one of just 11 programs in the country to be fully accredited by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the only one to serve as the official caretaker of holdings of the International Association for Identification. Those journals and papers offer a 100-year retrospective of crime-solving history.