Four members of the ISHI Advisory Committee were asked whether there was a moment they knew forensic science was the right career. The answers they gave weren’t the polished kind you rehearse for a job interview. They were the kind you only arrive at after years of doing the work.
Dawn Romano knew at a crime scene.
“This may sound morbid, but when I saw my first dead body, um, first couple of crime scenes I went to, I really realized like this. This is where I should be.”
She adds, without apology: “I’ve met my people and yeah, we just have a great time while getting the work done.” It’s the kind of thing only someone who’s spent two decades in a forensic DNA lab would say and mean.
For Shena Latcham, the moment came not from something she experienced in the lab, but something she watched happen to everyone around her.
She was in graduate school, living with her best friend who had just started medical school. Her sister was in medical school too. She watched what they went through — and something shifted.
“The light bulb went off and I said, I don’t need to be a doctor. I actually just love forensic DNA.”
She dropped the medical school applications, finished her graduate degree, and started looking for forensic DNA positions. That was twenty years ago. “I’ve never felt regret. I’ve never wished I did something else.”
Meradeth Snow’s answer came later in her career — and it came through someone else’s work.
She describes a collaboration with a former student, now Dr. Hayley, and the results they achieved together: “Mind blowingly amazing.” The kind of outcome that makes you feel like the whole path that led you there was intentional.
“I do feel like it was really a good point of note for me to be like, oh yeah, you know, you’re where you’re supposed to be.”
Pam Marshall answers the question by reframing it
.
“I tell my students all the time, you get one ride on this planet and you want to make sure that you love the heck out of whatever you decide to do.”
Her path has taken her from casework to academia, from bench analyst to directing a graduate program at Duquesne University. The specifics changed. The certainty didn’t.
“Whether or not it was at the bench and doing case work and now, uh, you know, having me there at Duquesne and seeing my students realize their own potential and their dreams, um, I truly love what I do.”
Meet the ISHI Advisory Committee
Dawn Romano is the DNA Technical Lead and Forensic Supervisor of the Biology Unit at Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Forensic Services Division.
Shena Latcham is a Forensic Scientist Supervisor in DNA Casework at the Missouri State Highway Patrol Crime Laboratory.
Meradeth Snow, Ph.D. is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Montana, specializing in degraded and ancient DNA, NGS, and forensic investigative genetic genealogy.
Pamela Marshall, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Director of the Forensic Science and Law Program at Duquesne University and a member of Promega’s Forensic Leadership Alliance.