About the author

Jim Russell moved from New England to Virginia Beach, Virginia in 2001 and has been involved in the Virginia Search and Rescue program since 2014.

He is the Director of the Search and Rescue Tracking Institute (SARTI), former Group Commander of Tidewater Search and Rescue (TSAR), and owner of IS IT HUMAN, LLC, specializing in Search and Rescue/Recovery training including Comparative Osteology for First Responders, land navigation, and human tracking.

Jim holds certifications as a Search Team Leader (STL), Management Team Member (MTM), and Tracking Technician (TT) from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM).

In 2019, Jim became an Adjunct SAR Instructor for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. Jim has been part of the Virginia Ground Search and Rescue Academy instructor cadre for the Tracking Team Operations (formerly called F.A.S.T.) class, Search Team Operations class, and the Search Team Leadership class. Jim is also actively involved in working with VDEM on the state's human tracking standards, Tracking Team Operations training curriculum, and is a VDEM Tracking Evaluator.

Since attending comparative osteology workshops at Radford University, Western Carolina University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Jim has been researching and developing his own workshop for comparative osteology, comparing and identifying animal versus human bones that are found during searches. He launched The Russell Bone Atlas (www.RussellBoneAtlas.com) in 2019, a comparative osteology website that searchers can use while in the field to help identify bones. In 2023, he founded Is It Human, LLC (www.isithuman.us),developed and is the instructor for the "Is it human? Comparative Osteology for First Responders" workshop which was sanctioned by VDEM in 2023 and offers the class throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Most recently, as part of a larger SARTI research project, Jim has been involved with researching the use of alternative light source (ALS) technology in the ultraviolet spectrum for the detection of human skeletal remains. SARTI is working closely with the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, Virginia Commonwealth University and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the development of this new technology for search and recovery missions. Jim co-authored Assessing the Effectiveness of Alternate Light Sources in Search for Skeletal Remains with Olivia Thompson which was published in the July 2025 Journal of Forensic Science.

Jim was awarded the Tidewater Search and Rescue team award in 2016, the Search and Rescue Tracking Institute team award in 2019, the U.S. Department of Navy's Navy Civilian Service Commendation Award in 2024, and the Virginia Search and Rescue Council's Lisa Hannon Award in 2025.

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