Humanitarian award for Professor Sue Black

Professor Sue Black, Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification within the College of Life Sciences, has been named the 2008 recipient of the Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology from the Royal Anthropological Institute.

The Lucy Mair Medal is awarded to honour excellence in the application of anthropology to the relief of poverty and distress, and to the active recognition of human dignity.

Describing the award as a 'huge surprise' Professor Black said, 'Forensic anthropology has a developing role to play in the alleviation of suffering, and in the last four years the University of Dundee has really invested and supported this enormously important venture'.

Professor Black's work in recent years has included identification of victims of the tsunami in Thailand and in areas of armed conflict including Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Iraq. Her forensic examinations have also played a key role in many criminal investigations within the UK.

Professor Black's own view of her work is certainly informed by an appreciation of human rights and an insight into human suffering.

'Forensic anthropology is best described as the analysis of human remains for the medico-legal purposes of establishing identity," she said. "Being able to assign a name to the deceased is critical to achieving psychological closure for families as well as being core to the successful outcome of all legal investigations.'

'In a judicial investigation, one cannot predict which parts of the human body will present for identification and therefore it is vital that every element be examined in an effort to determine the positive identity of the deceased. Within the last 10 years, forensic anthropology has come to play an increasingly important role in judicial investigations both within the UK and internationally, being core to issues of repatriation, mass disasters and war crimes.'

The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI) is the world's longest-established scholarly association dedicated to the furtherance of anthropology (the study of humankind) in its broadest and most inclusive sense.