Professor Dame Sue Black
Baroness Black of Strome
Pro-Vice Chancellor Engagement
Lancaster University
Email: Sue.black@lancaster.ac.uk
Baroness Black of Strome
LONDON
Professor Dame Sue Black is currently the Pro Vice Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University and is President elect for St. John’s College, Oxford, a post she will take up in September of 2022. She is best known, nationally and internationally, as an anatomist and a forensic anthropologist. She was the UK lead for her profession during the war crimes investigations in Kosovo and assisted with identification of those caught up in many mass fatalities including Thailand following the Boxing Day tsunami, Iraq, Sierra Leone and Grenada. She is an expert witness to the courts and her research into identification of perpetrators of child sexual abuse from images of their hands, has seen her assist police to secure over 30 life sentences and in excess of 500 years of prison detention.
She was awarded an OBE in 2001 for her work in Kosovo and a DBE in 2016 for services to forensic anthropology. In 2021 she entered the House of Lords as a crossbench life peer, taking the title of The Baroness Black of Strome in the County of Ross-shire. She is both Fellow and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the British Academy and the Royal Society of Biology. She is the lifetime Professor of Anatomy for the Royal Scottish Academy and has received numerous awards for her work including the Saltire Outstanding Woman of Scotland award, the Lucy Mair humanitarian medal and the Jephcott gold medal for scientific advancement. Her portrait by Ken Currie hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery under the title ‘Unknown man’.
She has made many media appearances including Hard Talk, Desert Island Discs and the Life Scientific. She has won literary awards for two popular texts ‘All that remains’ and ‘Written in Bone’ and is the author of over 100 scientific publications and 14 textbooks. Sue is Patron for three charities – Escape2Make, Archaeology Scotland and Locate International.