Lecturer rebuilds face of forensics

A UQ lecturer who has successfully rebuilt the faces of 12 unearthed skulls to enable police identification is now pursuing research funds to expand and formalise his 'late-night hobby'.

School of Dentistry Oral Biology lecturer Dr Alex Forrest heads a small team that has been using knowledge of skull and teeth characteristics to rebuild otherwise unidentifiable human heads since 1991. It's a skill that has put him on the quick-dial of police forensic units faced with solving cases based on unidentifiable human remains.

Though still largely an unpaid after-hours labour of love, Dr Forrest's computer-based reconstruction system has now achieved a level of tangible success that he hopes will pave the way for formalisation and funding.

'Basically, using this system, we can now recreate a recognisable face from a skull within two hours,' Dr Forrest explained. 'What previously took workers hundreds of hours using the more rudimentary and far less accurate technique of clay modelling is now a highly efficient and reliable procedure.

'Indicatively, out of the 12 police cases that I've so far been involved in, we've achieved a 70 percent success rate, which is to say that 70 percent of our reconstructed faces have later matched very closely with a picture of the deceased person.

'And we may well have achieved a much higher success rate, but to date the other 30 per cent of cases have yet to be linked to a specific missing person in order to compare our interpretation of their face.'

Dr Forrest said while skull reconstruction was not intended to be an absolute means of identification, it remained one of the best producers of investigative leads in the absence of other clues.

'Importantly, successful identification enables the grieving process to begin for families who might not otherwise discover the fate of their missing loved one,' he said.

Research funding would be directed towards building up the system's photographic database and developing methods to measure the facial parameters of living people using non-invasive techniques.

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO ARRANGE AN INTERVIEW WITH DR ALEX FORREST, PLEASE CONTACT CARRIE SCHOFIELD (tel. 07 3346 4713, email c.schofield1@mailbox.uq.edu.au) OR UQ COMMUNICATIONS (tel. 07 3365 3367)