New doctor eager to investigate homicide deaths


Kailee Imperatore wants to be a detective. Trained as a doctor – the 27-year-old just graduated from the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine as a member of its historic first class – she cares less about treating people directly, like a surgeon might, than she does about getting to the bottom of what ails them – or killed them.Kailee Imperatore graduation

This interest in hunting down the culprit – be it a germ, a cancer or, especially, a bad guy – took hold of Imperatore in middle school. She got hooked on the Discovery Channel program The New Detectives, which focuses on murder cases and the forensic science used to solve them and convict the perpetrators.

“The crime aspect has always fascinated me,” she says. “It’s putting all the pieces of the story together. Nothing gets me as excited as that.”

If Imperatore has her way, her business card will one day read “medical examiner,” which for a doctor is equivalent to “detective.” That role would have her conducting autopsies and testifying as an expert witness before juries.

“That’s going to be the biggest challenge: how to explain things so others understand,” she says of translating scientific findings for a lay audience. “I really think this is one of those [skills] you have to pick up as you’re doing it. Trial by fire.”


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Kailee ImperatoreSpecializing in pathology, the field from which most medical examiners emerge, Imperatore will soon begin working 80 or more hours per week at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach as a resident, a doctor in intensive clinical training. She will spend the next four years helping still-living patients, albeit behind the scenes, by testing and making decisions about the cell and tissue, blood and other samples sent to the lab by their physicians.

Guiding her will be the same man who mentored her at FIU: Dr. Robert J. Poppiti, chairman of the pathology departments at both the medical school and Mt. Sinai.

“That’s probably the biggest thing I’ve gotten out of FIU, being able to form that relationship,” says the Sarasota native who wanted to stay in South Florida specifically to work with Poppiti. Over the years he helped her choose her courses because the path to pathology is less defined than for some other specialties.

“I got to take a lot of ‘fun’ things,” she says, describing one of her favorite classes. “Forensic psychiatry, looking at people who commit crimes and are incompetent to proceed to trial or not guilty for reasons of insanity.”

Spoken like someone who has found her calling.   

 

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