The gruesome cases Dame Sue Black has helped solve may seem too gruesome for a Christmas lecture.
As she gives Britain's most prestigious public science lectures this winter, Black, one of the world's leading forensic anthropologists, will not be looking at the stuff of nightmares.
She will be looking at how our bodies are tied to our identities.
When we translate it, it can become gruesome, but what we actually do is interesting to everyone.
Black worked on how the features on our hands can tell us apart.
Black said that they can get everyone to look at their hands and see why they are different from one another. All of those things become very personable and you can talk about them at the breakfast table.
The application is quite dark. The approach was developed by Black in response to the case of the teenage girl who said she was sexually abused by her father. The girl had captured video footage, but investigators only had to look at the perpetrators hands.
Black is the president of Oxford's St John's College and is known for questioning what makes us who we are.
Black wants to explore these questions with the audience in the Christmas lectures.
The human body is made up of layers of memory and memories that have been laid down over time.
Our fingerprints and other features are shaped by the environment and development in the womb, not just by our genes.
Black used clues within the rib cartilage of a body found in woodland to reveal the person may have been trans, while the stable isotope composition of hair can indicate that someone has moved from one part of the body
Black is an expert in putting names to corpses and has been involved in many cases, from the "Limbs in the Loch" murder to identifying those killed in the 2004.
Black has previously said she was raped as a child. She knows that wasn't the reason she pursued a career in forensic science.
She says that her interest in anatomy was natural after she spent her formative years skinning rabbits and plucking pheasants from her father's gun.
Black said that understanding what is and what isn't important.
She said that the last thing you want to do is start a murder investigation and it turns out to be a piece of spare rib from a local restaurant.
She closes a psychological door on her work at the end of the day to cope with the harrowing aspect of her work.
The last thing you want to do is set a murder investigation going and it turns out to be a bit of a takeaway spare rib
She said that the door sometimes doesn't shut completely and that is a fear for everyone.
One case that has stayed with her is that of a man in Kosovo who lost 11 members of his family in a rocket-propelled grenade attack.
Black said that the man was looking for 11 body bags with a family member in them.
Experiences like that have left a mark.
She said that there was always the chance that something would happen.
Black has taken fingerprints, toe-prints and blood samples from her daughters. As a child, she discouraged them from having braces.
The crookedness of your teeth is a part of who you are. It would be nicer if your mouth looked like a graveyard than it did Tom Cruise.
Black doesn't think that criminals will learn anything from the lectures. She hopes to convey something.
Black says that most criminals are not very smart and that is why they are caught. They need to be aware that science is on their back.
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