When Deirdre Amaro, MD, walked into her first autopsy as a medical student, she didn’t expect to feel wonder. The case was messy, quite literally. A bowel perforation during evisceration and holding a human brain for the first time did not inspire revulsion as it might in some. “This is so freaking cool,” she remembers thinking then, and still thinks now as Utah’s chief medical examiner. Amaro didn’t set out to become a forensic pathologist. She began medical school with a vision of pediatrics as a career, but the pace of outpatient visits, the brief time she had to meet with them and the sorrow of inpatient pediatrics nudged her toward pathology. She completed a forensic pathology fellowship in New Mexico, followed by a neuropathology fellowship (“I’m prepared for the zombie apocalypse,” she jokes). She spent the next leg of her career as a sole practitioner for a sheriff’s office in far Northern California. Eventually, she decided she missed academia and took a position in Missouri, initially as an assistant medical examiner and later as the chief medical examiner. While there, she also joined the faculty at the University of Missouri in the pathology department. When asked what brought her to Utah to work as the chief medical examiner for the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), she, like many, mentions the beauty of the mountains, The Final Act of Care A Conversation With Utah’s Chief Medical Examiner By Barbara Muñoz, MPP, Associate Director, UAFP Dr. Deirdre Amaro and UAFP CEO Maryann Martindale outside of the Office of the Medical Examiner after a tour of the facility. 20
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