Belanglo State Forest is Ivan Milat territory - but the young woman's death does not match the murderer's timeline.

Her remains is all that is known of her, all that is left of her short life, which given the isolated terrain in which she was found, probably ended violently.

As she lay, covered in eucalypt litter, the forest slowly swallowed her identity.

A year later to the day she was discovered, Dr Susan Hayes stood in the Glebe Morgue, the young woman's skull in her hands. She would give a face to this faceless young woman - somebody's child, somebody's friend.

Unable to determine her identity through DNA, dental records and the Missing Person's Registry homicide detectives turned to Dr Hayes - Australia's only facial anthropologist.

As Dr Hayes held the skull she was keenly aware there was someone out in the world who loved her, who did not even know yet that she was dead. A mother herself, Dr Hayes offered the remains every respect as she built up the layers of flesh, muscle and then skin using computer imaging techniques and CT scans.

She told police she did not want to know the details of the young woman's death, or the circumstances in which she was found. Her focus was on her face.

All Dr Hayes was given was the time of death - estimated between six months and 10 years from when the body was found in 2010. Also, that she was female and aged between 13 and 25.

"I'm purely face," Dr Hayes said. "I don't do anything else. The age estimation for me was probably the most difficult aspect in that she could be either a teenage girl or a young woman. So working across that age range was difficult."

But reading the skull was routine for Dr Hayes, who began her training in facial approximation 14 years ago. While most of her work is now archaeologically based - bringing back to life historical skulls - she started her research on forensic cases.

While each skull is unique the methodology is similar whether the skull is a decade old or several thousand years old. First, repairs to the skull may need to be made, depending on its fragility. Then the skull has to be measured, a job that takes time and involves lots of spread sheets. The process can take up to eight weeks and may also include months of research across multiple disciplines, such as insight into the period and population and also the psychology of how people read and remember faces.

"Nothing is exact, everything is averaged," she says. "I use the science that we know to approximate the layers of soft tissue and apply as much evidence as the science tells us about what that person might have looked like when they were alive. I'm saying their eyes are shaped this way on average. Their nose is shaped this way on average. It's a general description rather than a specific portrait. It can be a bit frustrating and there's also a sense of apology, because of course every skull is unique."

The forensic image of the young woman that police called Angel, due to the word "Angelic" found on her T-shirt, generated more than 50 leads late last year, but to date none have led to her identification.

"When I work on someone's remains it's not about the law or courts, it's about reinvigorating the case, to give it a media bump, to generate leads in the hope that someone will recognise her and that she will be identified," says Dr Hayes.

Dr Hayes has a masters in Fine Art and a PhD in Facial Anatomy.

"I don't call myself an artist," she says. "While I can draw, my illustrations are more about how to make a nose look like a nose. Artists are usually saying something about the world while I don't interpret anything. Everything I do is science based. It's more of a scientific art."

She stumbled upon her career in a Melbourne bookshop.

"I was in this academic bookshop and came across this book about forensic identification of the skull. I took it home and read it from cover to cover. It just grabbed me. Nothing before that had excited me to do pure research. But this caught me. It was like I was suddenly in a relationship. Sometimes I get really angry with it and very frustrated and I want to walk away because it's too hard. But something will happen and I'll be dragged back into it again. It hits all my research buttons. You've got the skull, you've got archaeology, you've got forensic science. In fact I do this type of research better than I do relationships."

In December her image of the 18,000 year old 'hobbit' attracted worldwide media attention. Dr Hayes worked for a year on the skull which was a stereolithographic model of the skull generated from a CT scan. While there had been six drawings of the hobbit since it was discovered in Flores, Indonesia in 2003, this current image was scientifically based.

"The experience for me was different in that I applied what I knew anatomically about humans to an archaic hominin," she says. "I'm pleased with both the methodological development and the final results. She's not what you'd call pretty, but her face looks more modern than I expected. I had no idea how popular she was and how much media interest her image would create worldwide though. It was amazing."

Dr Hayes studied at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and underwent specialist training at the University of Dundee in Scotland. While she began her training working with clay on bone, she now creates the virtual images, having access to both the skull and CT scans. There are only a handful of facial anthropologists worldwide.

"It's not a huge field, so what I do is pretty unique really," she says. "Most of my work is archaeological. I'm lucky because we don't have many unidentified remains in Australia. There is plenty of historical skulls though around the world to keep me busy for the rest of my life, but the problem is funding. That's the tricky part. I go from project to project and when it's good it's good, but when it's bad, it's horrible. It's lucky I like lentils."

In the past few years scientists at the University of Dundee have brought back to life the faces of several historical figures including the German composer Bach and the half-sister of Cleopatra, Arsinoe. Earlier this year scientists also released the reconstruction of King Richard III.

Hayes has been based in Wollongong for the past year and is now an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Wollongong's Centre for Archaeological Science. Her previous works on archaeological remains have included skulls found in Vanuatu, New Zealand and Argentina. In Vanuatu she worked on four female skulls which were found in a quarry site. Using computer graphics she was able to give faces to the 3000-year-old seafaring Lapita people - the south Pacific's first inhabitants.

"With the Lapita women they were very much in bits and so the bones had to be repaired," says Hayes.

"It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle really, but exciting and interesting work."

A 600-year-old skull of a Maori woman found in New Zealand in 1939 was also produced digitally by Hayes, who at the time was not aware the remains belonged to a tribal elder of the iwi Rangitane, descendants of the first Maori people to arrive in New Zealand. Her image shows a strong and proud woman in her 30s.

"One of the nice things about working with archaeological remains is that I can pretend to myself that the person died from natural causes and in the loving arms of their family," Dr Hayes says.

The public can meet Dr Hayes at the UOW Big Ideas Festival on May 8. Anyone with any information about the possible identification of Angel can contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.