For Ledyard native Katelyn Norman, the path from art student to medical student to forensic assistant came naturally.

The Vernon Police Department last month unveiled a two-dimensional forensic facial reconstruction of an unidentified woman created by the 26-year-old Norman - a project that was a natural bridge between her artistic and scientific interests, not to mention a dream come true for the devoted "Law & Order" fan.

"I was the really nerdy, Type A art student and the really eclectic, disorganized scientist," said Norman, who took pre-medical courses while majoring in art at New York University. She's now a second-year medical student at Quinnipiac University's new Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine.

Norman spent the summer working with Richard Gonzalez, an assistant professor at the Netter School of Medicine, in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Farmington. Most of her time was spent cataloging and taking inventory and following Gonzalez around, said Norman, but she also had the opportunity to complete a facial reconstruction of the missing woman.

The woman in the project was probably in her mid-40s when she died, and her remains were discovered in Vernon in March 2013. Norman composed a sketch of her face from photographs of the skull, using math to correct for the camera lens and incorporating knowledge from her anatomy classes.

Facial reconstruction can't be 100 percent accurate, said Norman, and depending on the condition of the body, artists may have to make judgement calls about things like hair length, hair color and weight.

"The likeness is never going to be perfect. There are a lot of things you can't tell from bone," said Norman. And there's concern about convincing a family member that the body does not belong to their loved one because of an inaccurate facial reconstruction.

"At the same time, I suspect that having the reconstruction out there generates more interest in a case, so even if it's through indirect means the reconstruction could lead to an identification," she said.

And putting a face to the unidentified remains "helps for everyone involved to keep in mind that they aren't bones, it's not biological material. This is somebody that somebody's looking for."

The facial reconstruction is just the beginning of a three-year project, said Norman. No one coached her on how to do the reconstruction, so she began by reading the major texts on the subject and catching up on the most recent data.

"There are whole (scientific) papers just about how far the tip of your nose is from the base of your skull," said Norman.

But although there is a lot of data out there, "there's no real, clear-cut, 'This is what you have to learn, this is the path you have to take to become a forensic artist,'" she said.

Norman hopes to change that by coming up with a standardized methodology for making 2D facial reconstructions that is "easy and inexpensive and can be done without damaging the remains."

Working from photos instead of making a 3D model with clay or using medical imaging is trickier and might be less accurate, but it eliminates a lot of practical issues, she said.

"If you can come up with a 2D way to do it from photographs, you can do reconstructions for unidentified persons who have already been interred, for example," said Norman.

She said there are "many, many unidentified people" in Connecticut and in other medical examiners' offices, and having an inexpensive and accessible method for creating a facial image could help improve the chances of the bodies being identified.

With a 2D protocol, "you could send the photographs to an artist to work on. It'd be far less expensive; you'd avoid all the costs of either having to cast the skull or CT scan it and have a model made of it or, God forbid, putting the actual markers on the skull itself and damaging the evidence."

Norman said she isn't sure how much of a role forensic reconstruction will play in her future career, if any, but "it's so interesting. And the work feels so rewarding … I love that there's a real application."

Once the study is complete, Norman hopes to turn the experience into a chance for her to catch up on the painting she hasn't had time for in medical school.

"I think eventually I'd like to turn the project into a series of oil paintings," she said. "Once it's done-once kind of the science and the methodology and the reconstruction is done-I'd like to put some sort of artistic spin on it."

K.CATALFAMO@THEDAY.COM