"The best way to know about people of the past is to study mummies, skeletons, and burial artifacts. Working on a mummy tells us what an individual was like as a person," said Nelson, chair and professor of anthropology.

This week—marking the centennial of Howard Carter's opening of King Tutankhamun's tomb—American national public broadcaster PBS aired a two-part documentary titled Tutankhamun: Allies & Enemies, and Nelson is a featured player.

"I've worked with a lot of mummies, in Peru, Egypt and elsewhere and each one is special. Each one was a person who deserves our respect—and that's important and it's important to tell their stories—but but, there's only one King Tut," said Nelson.

At the production company's request, following a recommendation by Western-trained Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Cairo University's Kasr AlAiny Faculty of Medicine, Nelson was commissioned to participate in a new facial reconstruction of King Tut. The process involved using computed tomography (CT) scans and 3D bioimaging software Dragonfly, to create a virtual model of the King's skull.

"I have lots of scans of other Egyptian mummies, but it's really difficult to get a scan of a pharaoh, so working with King Tut is the ultimate experience," said Nelson, a member of Western's Bone and Joint Institute. "It was only through the involvement of Sahar that we could get permission from the Egyptian authorities to examine the data."