Lancaster University Professor To Reveal Secrets Of Forensic Science

One of the world’s leading forensic investigators, Professor Dame Sue Black, will deliver this year’s CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution.

In a series of three pre-recorded Lectures to be broadcast on BBC Four at 8pm on the 26th Dec, 27th Dec and 28th December, Dame Sue, a visiting professor at Lancaster University, will share the secrets of the real-life scientific detective process she uses to identify both the dead and the living.

Professor Dame Sue Black will reveal the secrets of forensic science in the 2022 CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution, London, at 8pm on BBC Four on the 26th Dec, 27th Dec and 28th Dec.

With the public more fascinated by science and forensics than ever, Sue will reveal why we shouldn’t believe everything we see in our favourite TV crime dramas. Using stand-out cases from her remarkable career, she’ll explore the huge leaps forward forensic science has made, as well as some of its limitations, and what the future might hold. And she’ll reveal how real life can be far stranger than fiction.

Dame Sue has played a lead role in some of the world’s highest profile forensic investigations, helping to identify the victims and perpetrators of conflicts and disasters internationally, including the conflict in Kosovo where she was the lead forensic anthropologist to the British Forensic Team, and the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification Operation. Sue is currently President of St John’s College Oxford.

Dame Sue said: “It is an enormous honour to be chosen to present the 2022 CHRISTMAS LECTURES. I’m looking forward to revealing the crucial but often unseen work of forensic investigators and to fuelling some young imaginations with this amazing area of science.

“And as discussing and critically examining science is so important to its application in our lives, I’ll also be asking some challenging and thought-provoking questions about the future of forensic science, whether our identity, actually, is wrapped up more in our memories than it is in our bodies, and what that might mean for crime detection.”

Welcoming Sue as the 2022 Christmas Lecturer, Director of the Royal Institution, Katherine Mathieson, said: “Through the pandemic, the climate crisis and other significant challenges facing the world, we’ve really seen science in practice; we’ve witnessed the scientific process of researching and gathering evidence in action, seen scientific advances as they happen and scientific exploration as it’s done.

“Our role at the Ri is to give everyone the opportunity to find out more about science, so we are delighted that Sue will be using the CHRISTMAS LECTURES to lift the lid on such an important and far-reaching topic.”

Tom Coveney, BBC Commissioning Head of Science, said: ”With more interest in forensics than ever, I am delighted that one of our leading experts – Dame Sue Black – will separate forensic fact from fiction in this year’s Lectures. No doubt viewers will be captivated by Sue’s insights into real crime scene mysteries; and her provocative questions about the future of forensics.”

The 2022 CHRISTMAS LECTURES will be broadcast on BBC Four and iPlayer between Christmas and New Year.

About the 2022 CHRISTMAS LECTURES

In the 2022 CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution, Professor Dame Sue Black will give an unprecedented insight into her role in deciphering secret messages hidden within the body as she strives to name the unknown, reuniting dead and living bodies with their identity.

She’ll reveal how extraordinary clues in our bones can reveal everything from our age, sex and medical history, to our diets and ancestry, as well as how the trend for body modifications – from split tongues to Teflon horns – has become a surprising forensic tool.

Sue will show how crimes can be solved from the smallest fragments of bones – using examples from her casebook – and contrasting the challenge of identifying someone from a single fragment, with the problem of identifying individuals in a mass grave which could have bones mixed from hundreds of skeletons.

We’ll see how fingerprinting and DNA testing has helped resolve wrongful convictions, but how it’s also led juries astray, with a special guest QC interrogating evidence live in the Ri Theatre, to reveal the limitations of this much-used tool of forensic science.

We’ll also look at the future of identifying the living. Sue will reveal how she’s developed a pioneering method of identifying criminals through the veins and wrinkles in their hands. And she’ll ask whether ultimately our identity is actually contained most in our memories, and whether this could ever be mapped for truly fool-proof identification.

Sue will be joined in each lecture by leading specialists such as detectives, lawyers, pathologists, and dog handlers.

About the 2022 Christmas Lecturer

Professor Dame Sue Black DBE is a forensic anthropologist, anatomist and academic and is currently the President of St John’s College Oxford, having previously been Pro-Vice Chancellor at Lancaster University where she remains a visiting professor.

She attended the University of Aberdeen where she graduated with a BSc degree with honours in human anatomy in 1982, and a PhD degree for her thesis on ‘Identification from the Human Skeleton’ in 1986.

Having been a lecturer in Anatomy at St Thomas’ Hospital between 1987 and 1992, Sue then spent a decade working for the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the United Nations, on the identification of victims and perpetrators of various conflicts. In 1999 she became the lead forensic anthropologist to the British Forensic Team in Kosovo and in 2003 she undertook two tours to Iraq. In 2005 Sue participated in the United Kingdom’s contribution to the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification operation as part of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami international response.

Sue has been an innovator in developing techniques and building databases to confirm or disconfirm someone’s identify based on photographs of their hands or arms. This technique has become important in prosecution cases where the accused have taken photographs of their actions. In 2009, Sue used vein pattern analysis to confirm the identify of a suspect; the first time that the technique was used in a criminal conviction.

As an author, Sue has published numerous works including her latest book, ‘Written in bone: Hidden stories in what we leave behind’. She was a founder of TheBritish Association for Human Identification and The British Association for Forensic Anthropology; has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, The Royal Anthropological Institute, The Royal College of Physicians and The British Academy; and is life-time Professor of Anatomy for the Royal Scottish Academy.

Sue is married with three children and features in a larger-than-life portrait by Ken Currie titled Unknown Man which hangs in the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, while crime writer Val McDermid used Sue as inspiration for a character in her book ‘The skeleton road’.