Irene Wong, BHS'01

By Karen Feldscher

Twenty-four-year-old Irene Wong is pretty new at forensics work. She got her first job, a good one, soon after she earned her bachelor’s in medical laboratory science. Wong was hired as a criminalist at New York City’s medical examiner’s office.

As chance would have it, she started work September 10, 2001.

The next day, Wong and her colleagues went into overdrive. In the wake of the World Trade Center’s destruction, bodies and body parts kept coming into the morgue. Wong, who’d expected to work in the DNA lab on sexual assault kits, found herself in the morgue day after day, cutting tissue samples to be sent for DNA analysis.

“I kind of developed this wall,” she says. “When you go into this work, you just do it. Then you go home, and you deal with it. I talked with my parents about it, and with friends.”

The whirlwind went on for a month, until more people were brought on to take over, and Wong and her colleagues could get back to doing lab work. “But when it was over, I wanted to keep helping,” she recalls. “It just felt like I needed to do something.”

Now that her job has normalized, Wong does what she was hired to do: analyze rape-kit samples. The work is quite interesting, she says, because every case is different.

And she’s learning more all the time. She recently took a course in bloodstain and pattern analysis. “We got to look at crime-scene photos, to try to figure out what happened,” she says.

The class was a step toward Wong’s long-range goal: Eventually, she wants to get out of the lab and into crime-scene investigation. “It’s more hands-on,” she says simply.

“Everybody wants to do CSI.”


See other profiles:

Liz Ziolkowski, MJ'87
William Graziano, MJ'80
Robin Smith, MJ'84
Paul Zambella, MJ'81