Women's History Month: Georgia woman becomes GBI Coastal Regional Crime Lab's first female manager

A local woman is breaking barriers at one of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's crime labs.Kristen Fripp was recently promoted to manager at the GBI Coastal Regional Crime Lab in Pooler. The GBI said she is the first woman to ever hold the position at the lab."I'm really proud to be the first woman here," Fripp said. "When it finally came to fruition, it was really exciting."Under her new role, Fripp will be responsible for the supervision of staff and others within the crime lab. Fripp's promotion comes years after she started at the facility. Fripp has been with the GBI since 1999."I started as a lab technician and then worked my way up from a scientist to a technical leader to an assistant manager and now the lab manager," she said.Fripp said when she first started, she was mostly working amongst men, but things have changed over the years."Right now, we are very much a female-dominated field. There's very few men overall at the crime lab side of the GBI," she said.Fripp said the women at her lab provide a variety of forensic services to law enforcement personnel."We provide services in chemistry, which is drug analysis, toxicology, which is your traffic cases for blood, alcohol and drugs. We also provide biology services. We do serology testing, which is body fluids and then DNA analysis," Fripp said.Beyond their efforts to help investigators solve crimes, Fripp said the women at her lab work to inspire young girls to enter the Science, Technology, Math and Technology (STEM) workforce."So we just had two of our scientists go to a women's STEM, a girls in STEM, and talk about science. We're always trying to encourage the younger generations that this is definitely something you can do, and we're all doing it," she said.With her recent promotion, Fripp said she hopes she can further those efforts to inspire future generations of women."I hope that that torch can be passed along after I'm gone," she said.