About

Forensic Science Summer Camp is a one-week day program run by PNW's College of Engineering and Sciences at the Hammond, Indiana campus, for students ages 14–17. For 2026, it ran June 15–19, sessions 9 a.m.–3 p.m. daily. The camp is free, funded by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. Registration has typically closed well ahead of the June session start, so a family interested in a future year should plan to apply early in the spring rather than wait.

The week is built around a single ongoing mystery: campers process a staged crime scene and collect physical evidence on day one, then spend the rest of the week learning the laboratory techniques needed to analyze what they collected — building toward solving the case by week's end. This is hands-on forensic methodology practice (evidence collection, chain-of-custody handling, lab analysis) rather than a lecture-based introduction to the field.

The camp is run out of PNW's forensic science program, the same department that operates the university's Bachelor of Science in Forensic Science and its affiliated Center for Crime and Forensics. The primary contact is Ronda Ann Waters, a Limited Term Lecturer based at PNW's Hammond campus.
This suits a middle-or-early-high-school student curious about forensic science as a possible career path who wants a genuine, if introductory, hands-on taste of evidence processing and lab technique — it's a lighter, shorter commitment than a multi-week residential forensic science intensive, and its free cost (thanks to grant funding) makes it one of the more accessible entry points into the field regardless of family income.