Professor Lucina Hackman

Prof Lucina Hackman is Professor of Forensic Anthropology and is currently employed at the award winning Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification as Head of Discipline.  She teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate students and supervises their research projects as well as providing input into both senior police and SOCO training courses.  She ran the award-winning National UK DVI training.  

Prof Hackman is a practising forensic anthropologist and has undertaken a wide range of casework in this capacity.  One of her areas of specialty is in the identification of age in the living for the purposes of assisting investigations in asylum seekers and refugees, communication in forensic science, trauma analysis with a concentration on cut marks and DVI.

She has authored multiple book chapters, is co-editor on three texts on human identification and the role of the expert witness and she has published multiple journal articles. She has successfully supervised PhD students in various projects including the analysis of heat exposed bone, age estimation from MR images and the comparison of epidermal and dermal fingerprints and continues to supervise PhD projects. 

Prof Hackman is a consultant on the Virtual Anthropology Service run by the University of Dundee providing coverage for police forces throughout Scotland and N. Ireland on a daily basis and has given expert evidence in both Scottish and English courts on a number of occasions in relation to both trauma analysis, identification and age estimation.  She is recognised as a member of the Home Office, UK Disaster Victim Identification response capability and is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a Chartered Forensic Anthropologist and is a registered forensic expert on the forensic expert database of the National Crime Agency.

Supervision

• An in-depth analysis of the use of MRI in age estimation utilising the knee - completed
• Communication of Trace evidence and Persistence in Forensic Science - current
• Standard setting in Forensic Anthropology, what is it and how do we do it?-current
• Pedagogy and Virtual Reality in Forensic Science Education-current
• Cut marks on bone and cartilage; methodology for optimising analysis -current
• An examination to identify and explore the impact of the variables that affect human body buoyancy, body movement and post-mortem submersion intervals in inland waterways - completed
• Analysis of the changes to bone exposed to high temperatures -completed
• A comparison of dermal and epidermal fingerprints for identification purposes-completed
• An in-depth analysis of the use of MRI for age estimation from the hand-wrist -completed
• Science capital and decision making in the judicial process - completed
• Forensic science communication and decision making -completed
• The Use of Knuckle Creases in Identification of Perpetrators from their hands -completed
• Skeletal Age Estimation and the Epiphyseal Scar: Challenging the status quo - completed
• A test of age estimation methods on a known population of Roma - completed
• The manual analysis of human biometric identifiers in nonpathological retinal fundus images: An evaluation of presented methodologies and a survey of identifiers within open source databases - completed
• An examination of the cranial trauma from a Cypriot population-completed

• Crime
• Forensic investigation