Dr. Kenneth G. Furton is Provost Emeritus and Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Executive Director of the Global Forensic and Justice Center and Director of the NSF Center for Advanced Research in Forensic Science. He is a world-leading scholar in olfaction and dogs and sensors research since 1994. From 2007 to 2014, he served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences raising $50M in philanthropic gifts and doubling research funding to $60M annually. From 2014 to 2022 he was FIU’s longest serving Provost, Executive Vice President, and Chief Operating Officer overseeing a $1.4B budget. He developed and implemented two bold strategic plans that led to across-the-board improvements in student success, research preeminence and national rankings including doubling the four-year graduation rates to over 60%, doubling research expenditures to $250M annually and a 30-fold increase in patents to more than 60 annually achieving a Top 20 patent ranking. He also helped secure over $100 million in philanthropic gifts and FIU moved from #8 to #1 in the state of Florida performance-based funding rankings. Under his leadership FIU secured and maintained R1 classification and was the most improved R1 university in the nation in U.S. News rankings, improving 54 spots in five years to No. 78 public and ranked No. 17 in Innovation. 

In 1998 he developed one of the first canine trainer and detection team certification programs with independent scientific validation which has evaluated over 2000 teams. He was the founding chair of the Scientific Working Group on Dog and Orthogonal Detector Guidelines (SWGDOG) in 2004 and chaired that group until it transitioned to the Organization for Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) Dogs and Sensor subcommittee for which he was the founding chair in 2014 until 2020. He was the founding chair of the Dog and Sensors Consensus Body of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences Standards Board (ASB) in 2016. He is the founding Director of the International Commission on Detector Dogs (ICODD). He has supervised the research of more than 160 students and received more than $20 million in grants. He has 34 patents, 761 presentations, 3 books and 332 peer-reviewed publications with more than 12,000 citations an h-index of 61 and an i10-index of 233. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He has testified as an expert witness in numerous high-profile trials. He has researched the detection of humans, drugs, currency, accelerants, explosives, mass storage devices, invasive species and medical conditions. His researching and deployment of COVID detector dogs during the global pandemic reached an audience of over 2 billion worldwide.