Professor Lady Sue Black is one of the world’s leading anatomists and forensic anthropologists and President of St John's College, Oxford. She was previously the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University. Her forensic expertise has been crucial to a number of high-profile criminal cases, including the conviction of Scotland’s largest paedophile ring in 2009, and she was the lead anthropologist for the British Forensic Team in the war crimes investigations in Kosovo.

Sue founded the British Association of Human Identification in 2001, the same year in which she received an OBE for her services to forensic anthropology in Kosovo. In 2016 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to Higher Education and Forensic Science and in 2021 entered the House of Lords as a crossbencher peer as Baroness Black of Strome. In 2024 she was appointed to the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle. She is the lifetime Professor of Anatomy for the Royal Scottish Academy and her portrait by Ken Currie is housed permanently in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Sue regularly makes appearances in the media talking about her work: she starred in BBC Two's History Cold Case and featured in the documentary After the Wave: Ten years since the Boxing Day Tsunami examining the forensic response in Thailand to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. She was picked as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the UK by BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and was a subject of The Life Scientific. She has also been the guest for BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions and presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2022.

The riveting story of her highly praised work, All That Remains: A Life in Death, was published by Doubleday in 2018, and was an international bestseller. Her second book, Written in Bone, was published in 2020 and won the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction. Her works have sold over 500,000 copies internationally and have been translated into 18 languages. Her latest book, An Expert Witness will be published in July 2026.