When criminal investigation expert Tom Mauriello needs a top-rate forensic pathologist, he calls Priya Banerjee, MD.

“In an investigation, everybody has their own specialty,” he says. “Nobody talks to each other. Priya’s a medical examiner who, beyond knowing her business as a physician, understands the needs and expectations of the investigative process.”

A senior lecturer in the University of Maryland’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice for more than four decades, Mauriello first encountered Banerjee in the late 1990s, when she enrolled in his crime-lab course Introduction to Criminalistics. The focus was on death investigations. She was hooked.

“We touched on everything—crime scenes, fingerprints, guns. I thought, ‘This is really cool!’” his former student, now an adjunct assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Brown, says.

Before college, Banerjee knew she wanted to study biology but hadn’t decided on a career. She was intrigued by the emerging field of forensic DNA, an interest that had been sparked a few years earlier as she watched the televised verdict of the O.J. Simpson trial in her high school library.

Then, as an undergraduate at Maryland, she balked at the university’s requirement to fulfill core requirements outside the sciences. So instead of taking British poetry or American history, she chose an entry-level criminal justice class. Banerjee became so enamored of the discipline—especially the role science plays in investigations—that she went on to take Mauriello’s upper-level courses, rounding out her double major in molecular biology and genetics with a concentration in criminology and criminal justice. She and Mauriello stayed in touch over the years, and, since becoming board certified in forensic pathology in 2012, she has worked with him on numerous cases.

Body of Evidence

People die in lots of different ways, but when a death is violent, suspicious, or unexplained, a forensic pathologist, also known as a medical examiner, is called on to investigate. Through death scene investigation, medical records review, autopsy, and toxicological, radiological, and other types of analyses, the ME aims to determine the manner, cause, and (to the extent possible) time of death. In Banerjee’s words, an ME is “a doctor who objectively applies their medical knowledge of disease in the context of death.”

In Mauriello’s estimation, it’s more than that.

“It’s easy to say ‘The cause of death was this or that,’ but how does that help the investigator?” he says. “Priya’s not just a good physician, she has good critical thinking and investigative skills too.”

To date, Banerjee has performed some 3,000 autopsies, including more than 160 homicide cases. But when she started medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, she didn’t yet know what kind of doctor she wanted to be. She had done basic science research at the National Institutes of Health for several summers and was good at it, but the work “just seemed too far removed to be purposeful. It wasn’t how my mind thrived,” she says. She enjoyed GI diseases, but knew she didn’t want to become a surgeon. Then she did a pathology rotation.

“I thought, ‘Everybody’s happy here. They’re solving puzzles, using all these tools and diagnosing diseases,’” she says. She asked to spend a week working in Philadelphia’s very busy Office of the Medical Examiner. That experience, which she describes as “awesome,” placed her squarely on her career path.

“Most people, even pathologists, hate autopsies,” she says. “They say, ‘It’s disgusting, it smells.’ But to me it’s like putting a puzzle together.”

Banerjee, whose Twitter bio declares, “I speak for the dead and teach the living,” has been helping solve death-related puzzles for more than two decades. As an assistant medical examiner for the State of Rhode Island starting in 2010, she worked on many locally known cases, including that of the murder of Captain Freddy, a 70-year-old veteran from Warwick, whose partially

“ Most people, even pathologists, hate autopsies. They say, ‘it’s disgusting, it smells.’ But to me it’s like putting puzzle together.”

skeletonized remains were found in his boat in 2015; and of Krystal Boswell, a young woman who was killed and buried near a vacant house in Cranston, in 2017. Banerjee was on call every third week, which was stressful: “Bad things don’t happen in the afternoon, they happen in the middle of the night.” And while performing an autopsy doesn’t bother her—“You’re just doing the case, collecting data”—she found investigating a death scene could be hard, especially when the deceased was found at home.

“It’s someone’s house,” she says sadly. “It’s more personal. You might see pictures of their kids, or their last vacation.”

In 2016, while still working for the state, Banerjee founded Anchor Forensic Pathology, LLC, to offer private autopsies, which she considers an “unmet need.” In many cases, when a patient dies, a hospital doesn’t perform an autopsy (“Dead people aren’t covered by insurance,” she notes), and sometimes family members want more information about their loved one—including information that could have health implications for them. Other times, they need something else. One man blamed himself for his mother’s death, believing it to have been caused by mold in her house. A brain-only autopsy revealed her death had nothing to do with that.

For Banerjee, this ability to offer people some form of closure is a key part of her work. “Everyone has a family. They all want to know, ‘How did my loved one die?’” she says. “I like to demystify that. I like people to understand.”

On the Record

The same talent for breaking down complicated information for surviving family members has made Banerjee a go-to medicolegal expert for the media. Many journalists have her number on speed dial. On television and the radio, online and in print, she has provided commentary about dozens of high-profile deaths, including the suicide of prison guard Vicky White, the sudden passing of actor Bob Saget, the remains of missing person Gabby Petito, and the murder of George Floyd, to name a few recent examples. In August 2022, Banerjee’s involvement in the Captain Freddy case was included in the “Tell No Tales” episode of Forensic Files II. She also provides expert legal testimony, and has been involved in more than 50 criminal and civil cases in several states.

Banerjee has testified about opioid-related deaths in Oklahoma and Rhode Island, and she offered gunshot wound and crime scene interpretation in the successful 2020 wrongful death lawsuit Breonna Taylor’s family brought against the Louisville, KY, police department after officers shot and killed Taylor in her home.

Banerjee’s urge to explain serves her well as a teacher for a variety of audiences. In addition to her appointment at the Medical School (where she received a 2019 Clinical Teaching Award), Banerjee has taught forensic medicine at Roger Williams University and Boston University. And she has guest lectured on gunshot wounds, overdose deaths, autopsies, and more for Johnson & Wales University, the Rhode Island State Police Training Academy, theRhode Island Office of the Public Defender, and the International Association of Arson Investigators.

At a summer 2022 conference sponsored by Brown’s Office of Women in Medicine and Science, Banerjee stressed the importance of “clarity and concision” when communicating with the public, framing both media and social media exposure as an opportunity to explain medical concepts to people who are not physicians. This has become ever-more important given the ubiquity of true crime books and shows, from the early television franchise CSI: Crime Scene Investigation to HBO’s recent hit The Staircase. (Some can leave viewers with rather fanciful ideas, Banerjee told the audience. A family member of the deceased once asked her, “Did the killer leave an imprint on his eyes?”) And while she likes the personal and public impact of teaching and testifying, she added that she wants to represent her profession in a positive light: “We’re not creepy people or basement dwellers.”

It’s easy to start talking in very technical terms and lose the ability to bring it down to a lay person’s level. Priya hasn’t lost that skill. That’s why she gets interviewed so often.”

And it’s true, at least when it comes to Banerjee. With her wide smile and ready laugh, she is anything but morbid. An avid Peloton user, enthusiastic knitter, and lover of cats and dogs, she also enjoys making good use of her two “COVID purchases,” a pizza oven and an ice cream maker, with her 8-year-old daughter. Lance Truong RES’24, DO, associate chief resident of the Brown Pathology Residency Program, describes her as warm and approachable, upbeat and bubbly. She is a true mentor, he adds, someone with whom he has a personal connection.

“The magic of Priya is that in addition to being a phenomenal physician, she’s a very down-to-earth person,” says Truong, who will be a fellow in pediatric pathology at Boston Children’s Hospital starting in 2024. “They say pathologists are the doctors’ doctors: our audience is other medical professionals. It’s easy to start talking in very technical terms and lose the ability to bring it down to a lay person’s level. Priya hasn’t lost that skill. That’s why she gets interviewed so often.”

During Truong’s residency, the two have bonded over a common interest in bugs and corpses. An entomologist before he was a pathologist, Truong worked with his mentor to create a forensic entomology how-to page on the website PathologyOutlines.com. The guide contains everything an ME might need to know about, say, insect colonization on a decomposing corpse, or how the consumption of maggot-infected foods affects the body, or the fact that beetles can bore into bone and create microscopic marks that look just like the damage caused by bullets.

When asked if she’s ever been to the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (a.k.a. “The Body Farm”), which is dedicated to the systematic study of human decomposition, Banerjee’s large brown eyes light up. “No, but I really want to!” she says. “Lance and I were thinking of doing that type of experiment here in Rhode Island, near the water. Something non-human-body related, of course.”

Answering the Call

Banerjee left the Rhode Island Office of the Medical Examiner in 2021. She contracts part time for the Clark County medical examiner in Las Vegas, and has been a contract forensic pathologist for the states of Maine and New Hampshire. That’s in part because there is a “critical” workforce shortage, according to the US Department of Justice’s 2019 Report to Congress: Needs Assessment of Forensic Laboratories and Medical Examiner/Coroner Offices. The National Association of Medical Examiners reports there are fewer than 500 board-certified forensic pathologists in this country, with fewer than 50 being trained each year—a shortfall that the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated.

This comes as no surprise to Banerjee. She cites the many years of training required (four years of medical school followed by three years of pathology residency followed by a year of fellowship) and the relatively modest salaries for a publicly employed ME, noting wryly that forensic pathology is “the only pathology specialty where you earn less money by doing a fellowship.” But she is quick to add: “You do this work because you love it. I truly believe it’s my calling.”