New York Times Bestseller author Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist on whose life and work the popular television show, "Bones," is based. She currently is with the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale in the province of Quebec. She is one of the few forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. She is past Vice President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and serves on the National Police Services Advisory Board in Canada. A professor of anthropology at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Dr. Reichs is a native of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. at Northwestern.

Her work as a forensic anthropologist is internationally recognized.  She has traveled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide; helped identify individuals from mass graves in Guatemala; and done forensic work at Ground Zero in New York. She has identified war dead from World War II and from all of Southeast Asia, and has even examined remains from the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Experiences she has had while working in forensic anthropology spawned her best selling novels.  Each new story plays on an aspect of forensic anthropology and matter classification that Dr. Reichs has personally used in her work, which makes the work of her main character, Temperance Brennan, authentic. 

Kathy's first Temperance Brennan novel, Déjà Dead, catapulted her to fame when it became a New York Times bestseller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel.