The National Center for Missing Adults is a United States organization which assists in tracking missing adults. The organization was created in response to the disappearance of Kristen Modafferi of Charlotte, North Carolina, who vanished without a trace on June 23, 1997, three weeks after her eighteenth birthday. Having just completed her freshman year at North Carolina State University on a Park Scholarship, she had traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area for the summer to study photography at the University of California, Berkeley. Because she was 18 at the time of her disappearance, the lack of resources available for searching for her were noted.