John Clement is the Professor and Inaugural Chair of Forensic Odontology at Melbourne Dental School at the University of Melbourne and Deputy Head of School. He is also a visiting Honorary Research Fellow at the Forensic Institute of the Defence Academy of the UK at Cranfield University. He was the first Director of the Centre for Human Identification (CHI) at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM) from 2003-2007. Prior to this, from 1989, he was head consultant forensic odontologist to the VIFM overseeing forensic odontological services across the State of Victoria.
Prof Clement is past President of both the British and Australian associations/societies for Forensic Odontology (BAFO and ASFD), a founder member of the International Association for Craniofacial Identification (IACI) and Dental Ethics and Law Society (IDEALS). For more than 40 years Prof. Clement had practical hands-on experience of forensic identifications that often required inferring life history events from analysis of skeletal remains. Establishment of age-at-death always being problematic and this led to the establishment of the Melbourne Femur Research Collection in 1989.
As a forensic scientist with particular expertise in the interpretation of skeletal remains Prof Clement has served on an expert advisory panel to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) dealing with the problem of the identification of missing persons and human remains following conflicts and civil strife. Similarly, for several years he was also a member of the Scientific Steering Committee on Forensic Science Programs to the International Commission on Missing persons (ICMP) based in Sarajevo.
Prof Clement has published 2 books and more than 20 book chapters on forensic identification issues in addition to more than 110 peer reviewed scientific articles in high impact international scientific journals. Many of these are derived his life‘s work identifying both the living and the dead.