“I’d never known an Indigenous doctor, so I hadn’t seen medical school as an option for someone like me.”

Karissa French still remembers her first autopsy. As an undergraduate in biochemistry at the University of Windsor, she’d become intrigued by toxicology and landed a work placement at the county medical examiner’s office in nearby Detroit. “As I watched a forensic pathologist examine the body,” she recalls, “he pointed out the findings that would help determine the cause of death. I found it very interesting how all the clues fit together in a kind of logic puzzle, almost like a Sherlock Holmes story.”

After completing a master’s in biology at Cardiff University in Wales, Karissa entered the four-year MD program at Western University. After a fifth year of specialized training, she was qualified to practise as an anatomical pathologist, diagnosing diseases in living patients. But her final goal, investigating sudden or unexplained deaths, required a sixth year focused on the forensic subspecialty. And for Karissa, this presented a serious financial challenge.

Fortunately, that gap was bridged by a G. Raymond Chang Forensic Pathology Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

New opportunities

Dedicated to fostering emerging talent, the fellowship is endowed by the Raymond Chang Foundation, which honours the legacy of the business leader and philanthropist. The annual award recognizes the vital role forensic pathology can play in advancing justice and public health. Created for learners from low- and middle-income countries, the award was extended to applicants from Canada when the pandemic constrained travel.

For Karissa, the fellowship opened up opportunities she’d never imagined growing up in Calgary, where her parents maintained close ties to their B.C. communities, the Nazko and Neskonlith First Nations: “My idea of a career was to get an undergrad degree. I’d never known an Indigenous doctor, so I hadn’t seen medical school as an option for someone like me.”

On completing her subspecialty in 2023, Karissa joined Ontario’s Forensic Pathology Service, where she performs autopsies and reports on her findings. In the case of violent deaths, she looks for patterns of evidence that can help investigators and is often called to testify in court.

Forensic analysis also yields a more nuanced understanding of public health issues. This is particularly valuable in Indigenous communities that face barriers to care and where the prevalence of problems like addiction can influence diagnostic assumptions. “Just because there are high levels of alcoholism or drug use in a community doesn’t mean a death can’t be caused by something else,” Karissa says.

For example, an emergency physician who concludes a patient has overdosed may miss subtler signs of an assault that contributed to their death. “Or if someone regularly reports pain related to substance use, they may not receive the full suite of imaging that a patient without their history would get,” Karissa explains. “So I’ll do an autopsy and may find the cause of death was in fact a perforated gastric ulcer.”

Sharing such insights helps hospitals review their approaches to patient care. “Also, if you can tell someone their family member died not from an overdose but from a natural disease, that can mean a lot emotionally,” Karissa says.

Solving medical puzzles and creating positive social impact – these two dimensions of Karissa’s early ambition have converged in a rewarding career. “Not everyone can say they’re doing exactly what they wanted to do,” she says. “I’m grateful for the role that the Chang Fellowship played in making it possible for me.”

Financial assistance to students, mainly in the form of scholarships and bursaries, accounts for the largest share of the total annual payout from Endowment funds. For the U of T fiscal year ending April 30, 2025, about $1.7 billion – representing 43% of the university’s total $3.9 billion in endowments – was directed to student support.*