In 1980, just before entering dental school, Harry Zohn attended a lecture by Simon Wiesenthal, the renowned Holocaust survivor and Nazi-hunter, who explained that it was crucial to identify dead Nazis in order to focus precious resources on tracking down those who had survived.

The idea—of the importance of identifying the dead—stayed with Zohn for a decade, and in 1990, he enrolled in a forensic dentistry course given by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Today, Zohn, a professor at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine, is also a consultant for the Northern Regional Medical Examiner Office in Newark, New Jersey, and a member of the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, using his forensics skills to help identify the dead in criminal cases, assist in civil litigation, and help families find closure when postmortem visual identification isn’t possible.

[READ AN INTERVIEW WITH ZOHN HERE]

He was on hand to identify the victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the 2009 crash of a Continental Airlines flight that killed 50 passengers near Buffalo, New York. On average, he’s summoned to the medical examiner’s office once a month to assist in postmortem identifications or to help track or identify a suspect through bite marks on a victim.

Forensic workers sift through debris recovered from the World Trade Center

w17_GettyImages-1367427_master_inline.jpg

Forensic workers sift through debris recovered from the World Trade Center and brought to the Fresh Kills landfill on October 10, 2001, in Staten Island, New York. Human remains were amid the debris, and forensic dental experts, such as Harry Zohn, a professor at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine, were able to identify victims through dental evidence.

Photography: 
Greg Brown

Each year, he passes along his forensic knowledge to an enthusiastic group of Rutgers dental students in a highly popular two-part class. In the first part, students hear a variety of speakers from the world of dental forensics. In the second, they work hands-on in the medical examiner’s office in Newark—a rare privilege. “As far as I know,” Zohn says, “it’s the only course of its kind offered to dental students in North America.”