Becoming a chief medical examiner

[Dr. Fierro]: I am Dr. Marcella Fierro. I am a forensic pathologist and I serve as the chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia. My career track began, I think probably, when I was in college and I was a science major and planned to go to medical school, which I did. I went to the State University of New York at Buffalo and received my doctor of medicine degree in 1966. I completed a clinical internship, and then I entered a residency in pathology, which I thought would be very exciting because it's the study of the nature and causes of disease processes. So I did that and that was four years and then I completed a fellowship in forensic pathology, which I found to be even more interesting because the problems there were extremely interesting. Problems of cause of death, you know what is the disease, the injury, or poison that resulted in the physiological death of the person.