President's Welcome

Happy New Year! I wish you a prosperous and healthy New Year.
It is a pleasure to serve as your NAME President for 2026. Whether you are a medical student, a forensic pathologist, a medicolegal death investigator or an emeritus member, your voice and input matters in the important work we do and the families we serve. Our membership is the strength and backbone of our organization.
I am humbled to be following in the footsteps of our prior leader and past president, Dr. Reade Quinton. One of my goals this year is to strengthen our committees’ work with projected goals for completion and succession planning by appointing Vice Chairs to ensure our committees remain strong and viable in the years to come.
I will be working with our new government and legal affairs committee, under the leadership of MJ Menendez and Dr. Ted Brown, who will establish a framework for members to follow in bringing any legislative encroachment issues that would have a negative impact on medicolegal death investigation to NAME leadership.
We will offer an additional ad hoc committee this year that will bridge the experiences of the younger and more seasoned professionals to speak about important topics such as mentorship, career planning and what it means to lead, topics of the job not available in most training programs.
Our Vice-President, Dr. Ponni Arunkumar, and I will continue to work as your American Medical Association (AMA) Alternate Delegate/Delegate to ensure our members’ voices are heard loud and clear on issues affecting medicolegal death investigation in the House of Medicine.
As an organization and for our future leaders, we need to think about long range goals, one being what our footprint in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be like in the next several years. At our last NAME meeting, our program Chair, Dr. Paul Uribe, placed several excellent presentations on the program relating to AI. The AMA has performed extensive work in AI, and one thing is clear, AI cannot replace our field or our expertise. Medicolegal death investigation is a combination of science and art and creating that balance will be difficult, if not impossible for AI to duplicate. That is not to say that AI will not have a place in forensics, specifically to help with workflow challenges.
I would challenge all of you to start thinking of processes in your office or in our field in which AI may be helpful, such as workflow integration, education and training and collaboration. Examples include streamlining processes for investigations, our doctors and our case management systems, establishing phone assistance to families in multiple languages who are requesting an autopsy report, or seeking additional information on our involvement with their loved one’s death, and providing grief resources in multiple languages, or streamlining public requests for information, just to name a few.
Regardless, like many things which affected our profession in the past, for those future challenges, we will work together to have well thought out solutions, but it is up to us to lead that path and not have others lead for us.
In closing, I look forward to working with all of you and having a productive year.  
Sincerely,
Michelle A. Jorden, MD
NAME President 2026