"Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer" Features Ann Burgess A Groundbreaker in the Field of Criminology

My work as a methodologist in terms of the FBI study on criminal profiling was to give the agents a task or a skill that they didn't have. They were not, researchers didn't know much about victims, didn't know anything about victims and I think I brought the victimology piece to them. I could talk to them about that part and then I would say that when you are looking for a criminal, you've got to know why he picked the victim he did.

They, they often wouldn't have necessarily looked at the backgrounds of, of the men that they were trying to investigate. So they learned as well as we learned and then we crunch the data down.

I will say for any young woman going into a new career data is so important. We have a coder and she says you can't give me enough data. I want as much data as you can give me because we're using machine learning. We're using A I and you just feed that into a machine. So there's gonna be a whole different way of learning for young people nowadays.

That the story was told by women was I think an important part of the docu series because it was a story about victims, primarily women were the victims. And with the story we were telling the certainly the understanding rape as a traumatic event was important and the work that nurses were doing so. Yes, that was important for women.

Of course, my field of nursing has traditionally been female and my early work, that's why I was hesitant to go down to the FBI because I knew they were all male. I was talking to primarily female nurses and crisis workers who are predominantly female in my early work of getting the word out. So I wondered, and I was curious though how it would be to talk with all men, which is exactly what was at the FBI academy.

That was not a battle I was gonna fight, you know, when you're doing it, you're doing it, you're not thinking about what it is you're doing or your influence. I think that's the important thing. I just did the things I felt needed to be done and just kept going.

It's very important to have women in, in the fields because I don't think women realize that they're good at it if they like it, if they like data or they like interviewing or whatever they need to be in it, it's wide open, it is wide open. And I think that they can find and if they can't find something that they're interested in, go and talk to someone so that someone who has, the career planners, they, they are very savvy in that area. So I would just encourage young people to not, in any way, restrict themselves to any particular field. Try to understand a wide variety before they make a decision.