Faculty Profile: Carraugh Reilly Nowak

At 10 p.m. on February 12, 2009, Carraugh Nowak received a tragic phone call. A commuter plane had crashed outside Buffalo, New York. As chief investigator for the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office, she headed straight to the scene.

The crash of Colgan Flight 3407 would occupy Nowak for the next ten months. She had helped write her office’s mass casualty plan. Now, she coordinated teams of doctors, law enforcement officers and forensic scientists as they began the grim task of identifying 51 bodies. 

“We went through multiple rounds of DNA testing and fingerprinting and other methods,” she said. “Sometimes we used implants, like hip implants, that had serial numbers on them.” In the end, her teams named every victim. 

Today, Nowak helps others get hands-on experience in death investigations. As an associate professor at Hilbert College, she teaches in the school’s Bachelor of Science in Forensic Science: Crime Scene Investigation program and chairs its criminal justice department.

“I find the human body very interesting, and I find it interesting to understand why things happened,” she said. “But the most rewarding part of the job is giving voice to someone who can’t speak for themselves anymore. You’re providing information and closure to the survivors who are left behind.”

The Science of Bones

Forensic science was not Nowak’s original career goal. When she was growing up in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg, she wanted to be a doctor. She started college at the University at Buffalo as a pre-med major.

She struggled, however, with courses like chemistry. An advisor suggested switching to a field related to medicine: forensic anthropology, a branch of physical anthropology that studies human skeletal remains to help solve criminal cases.

To find out whether it was the right field for her, Nowak opened the Yellow Pages and called the medical examiner’s office. As she heard the sounds of saws and clanking metal in the background, she asked a doctor whether she could intern there. He told her to come in on Monday morning.

“I showed up, and I basically shadowed him,” she recalled. “I took notes for him for about 150 autopsies that year.”

Nowak wound up earning a bachelor’s degree in physical anthropology, followed by a master’s degree in forensic science from George Washington University. She hoped to work for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, but hiring froze after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

Instead, she put in a call to the Erie County Medical Examiner. Yes, they said, they’d love to have her back.

Investigating Deaths—and Preventing Them

Nowak spent the next ten years at the medical examiner’s office, specializing in medicolegal death investigations. She examined corpses and crime scenes prior to autopsies, passing her findings along to doctors and detectives.

“I found it interesting to be able to take things that sometimes didn’t even look human anymore, due to decomposition and trauma, and to figure out what happened,” she said. 

“Instead of being a doctor, I was just looking at the other side of things. Was the death naturally occurring? Was it an accident, suicide or homicide? How did we piece that back together?”

She also worked to prevent accidental deaths. After seeing an uptick in infant deaths, she worked with the Department of Health to provide maternity wards with information on safe sleep environments to prevent Sudden Infant Death. She instructed other investigators on how to use CDC Guidelines to confirm or rule it out as a cause of death.

Along the way, Nowak started teaching forensic science part-time at Hilbert. She went full-time in 2010, when her second child was due. Suddenly, “Being on call 60 hours a week [for the medical examiner] seemed like too much,” she said, and her passion for teaching led to a rewarding career change.

A Search for Missing Persons

At Hilbert, Nowak tries to give students the same combination of academic learning and hands-on experience that she received in her college days. In her forensic science classes, she includes projects that put her students’ skills to practical use.

“It’s very rewarding for me when I see the students having these light bulbs go off,” Nowak said. “They say, ‘Oh, that's what that meant,’ or they find an aspect of a case they want to research further.”

Her favorite projects involve a clearinghouse called the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System: NamUs, for short. It tries to match information about missing persons with information about unidentified remains. 

For Nowak, the interest is partly personal—she’s searched NamUs for a cousin who’s been missing for 21 years. 

For her students, it’s a form of detective work. She assigns them to research a missing person online and try to associate them with a nameless set of remains. Her students also add information to NamUs from no-body murder trials, in which a defendant is convicted of homicide without a body being found. 

So far, the work has not led to any positive identifications that we know of. But it’s helped exclude some names as matches for particular remains, she said. “Even if it’s just an exclusion, you can see that someone is at least working on your loved one’s case, although they're not necessarily being found.”

Another focus is to keep students up-to-date with techniques in the field. “One of our students did research about fingerprints on spent cartridge casings,” she noted. “That’s a newer science that’s emerging. It used to be thought that you couldn’t get fingerprints off of spent cartridges.”

Above all, she wants students to learn from experience. In the capstone class (the last class of their program), the instructor films them when they’re examining a crime scene and has them observe the results. 

“They can watch themselves missing something or not looking somewhere,” she said. “We hope that they make the mistakes here at Hilbert so that when they go into the field, they don’t make those mistakes on real cases.”

Investigate Career Possibilities in Forensic Science/CSI

A relatively small and socially conscious institution like Hilbert offers advantages for studying behavioral sciences, Kumiega said. One is the chance for in-depth personal connection.

“Students get to know one another in class, to have those hard and difficult conversations in a safe place,” she said. “I encourage everybody to share their perspective on addiction and how it may have affected them, personally or within their family.”

She personalizes online classes, as well. She holds Zoom office hours for students. She enlists alumni as mentors. She leaves space in every course outline to ask students what topics they’d like to know more about.

Such measures reflect her belief in the value of relationships, both for counselors and for their clients. “A lot of times we want to be able to take the hurt away,” she said. “Instead, we need to be the person who is just going to listen. Don’t feel sorry for them and try to problem-solve. Just take the journey.”

Investigate Career Possibilities in Forensic Science/CSI

Forensic science applies science to the service of solving crimes while helping victims and families find restitution and closure. A program like the Bachelor of Science in Forensic Science: Crime Scene Investigation at Hilbert College can prepare students with foundational skills, whether they intend to work in the field directly or advance it through research. Learn more about how such a program can lead to a rewarding and impactful career in the field of forensic science: CSI.