Trends show national shortage of forensic pathologist slowly turning corner
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — Following a recent News 8 report detailing a family given remains of a loved one thought to be their sister, who then learned she was living in Detroit — we are taking a deeper look at what goes in to identifying someone after death and other factors which may have been a factor in what happened.
Rochester family told missing woman was found dead, only to learn she's living in Detroit
As a starting point, experts say it's crucial to understand a forensic pathologist is a medically trained doctor. This means a person who wants to become a forensic pathologist must first complete medical school, which is costly and timely. Then, there is specialized training, even beyond pathology residency, to get into the forensic route — meaning these are the cases a legal system would want to know why a person died.
There's been a slight growth of interest in the field following the COVID-19 pandemic where these workers were considered essential and truly on the front lines of determining causes of death. Dr. Reade Quinton is the 2025 President of the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME) and practicing forensic pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.
He explains there typically had been around 35 people completing and passing the board exams on a yearly basis — that's now about 45 to 50 people annually, and this is across the country. He adds this is barely outpacing the number of people leaving the practice. 'There are many, many positions that go unfilled across the country every year and we estimate right now that there's probably about 750 to 800 practicing forensic pathologists across the entire country right now and the estimates are we probably need about double of that,' Dr. Quinton says. URMC has a training program for forensic pathologist. Dr. Marisa Jacob-Leonce is a forensic pathologist and the Director of Autopsy at URMC. She is also a member of NAME and sits on several committees within the organization (including one which writes the questions for the exams). 'It's a field where there's actually limitations and offices accredited as to how many cases an individual forensic pathologist can do a year just to ensure that the rates, or the probability of having an error occur is significantly reduced,' Dr. Jacob-Leonce said. 'Persons are typically capped at around 250 to 300 autopsies a year and this is someone who doesn't have a big workload in terms of having other administrative duties or teaching duties and so if you have someone who's now the Chief Medical Examiner or has a significant amount of time teaching in a medical school or somewhere else – that number kind of has to be reduced. And so, you find that we have more cases than persons trained to do autopsies.' NAME maintains an industry-standard set of rules and guidelines all practicing forensic pathologist adhere to, including when a death falls under the jurisdiction of a Medical Examiner's Office, as not all instances require an autopsy. 'When it comes to scientific ID, the low hanging fruit, meaning what's usually available is doing some sort of comparison, usually dental records. Again, I like to remind people, in order to do a comparison, you first need something to compare it to; and so in order to do dental records where you are doing an x-ray at a time of autopsy to compare, you need someone where you have the dental records while they were living and knowing that this is the actual person,' says Dr. Jacob-Leonce. She also explains there is a joint fellowship program between URMC and the Monroe County Medical Examiner's Office — something they are still seeking to fill this year.
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