By Thomas A. Parmalee
People who donate their brains don’t usually give much thought to the person who will one day open their skull.
And honestly, that’s probably for the best.
After all, not many people make a career out of brain recovery. Nationwide, it’s likely that only a few hundred individuals practice the craft, which — unlike funeral service — doesn’t require a license or a degree.
To specialize in brain recovery, the path is surprisingly straightforward: hang out your shingle, name your price, and get comfortable with the tools of the trade, which is the route Calvin Amato took starting in 2024.
Amato, 29, an intern with a New Orleans funeral home, is one of those people who is hard to label.
An independent contractor when he’s not working at the funeral home, he travels around the country removing brains, working and collaborating with various brain banks and medical institutions.
He spent nearly a decade as a consultant advising companies in the hospitality industry, traveling extensively across the United States and Canada. His clients included hospitality groups, restaurants, universities, and hospitals.
When the pandemic hit, business slowed significantly, forcing him to reassess whether he wanted to continue down the path he’d chosen.
“At end of day, something was just missing,” he said. “So, I took some time to evaluate what I had been doing and what I wanted to be doing. And something that had always been in the background was funeral service.”
Growing up in Bellwood, Pennsylvania, a town of about 900 people, Amato “went to funerals all the time” – partly, because his dad knew everyone.
“My dad worked on the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, and his father was part of the local government in town,” he explained.
“If there was a funeral of someone we knew … or even someone my dad had met at the grocery store, he’d tell me, ‘We need to pay our respects.’”
Amato’s connection to funeral service would kick into a new gear when in 2016, he secured an apartment at a nonfunctioning funeral home in Pittsburgh. The owners had recently purchased the location from someone leaving the profession.
“They had plans to turn it into a secondary location and were renting the upstairs and said, sure, I could stay there,” he said.
He got to know the owners, who he sometimes visited at their working location, and they were kind enough to answer his questions about the profession – and he had plenty.
Ultimately, he ended up working at Koch Funeral Home in State College, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour away from his hometown in Pennsylvania.
He landed the job the old-fashioned way: He picked up the phone, called and asked if they had a job for him.
“They said I could start out working visitations and see if I liked it … and it evolved into going out on removals and helping out in the prep room,” he said.
Around the same time, he began working at two other funeral homes, Derman Funeral Home in Tyrone, Pennsylvania and Jon C. Russin Funeral Home in Bellwood, handling a variety of tasks and giving him additional exposure to the profession.
“I kind of floated around a bit,” he said. “I was going to college at Indiana University of Pennsylvania from 2015 to 2017, and then I finished my undergraduate degree at Arizona State, earning a Bachelor of Arts in neuroscience at the end of 2023.”
In 2024, at age 27, he enrolled at the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science; he expects to graduate in June and obtain his funeral director’s license after completing his internship in September.
He didn’t become interested in brain recovery until a research study of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is a progressive, degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive head impacts, commonly found in athletes and military veterans, caught his attention.
“I did not meet the age requirement to qualify as a living subject, but I learned that they needed funeral homes to participate in the recovery aspect,” he said. “So, that was a green light for me to jump on the opportunity.”
He went to Mount Nittany Medical Center to learn how to recover a brain from a deceased person.
“The second time I went, they told me, now it’s time to do it on your own – and they handed me the saw to take out the brain myself.”
The experience was a bit “nerve wracking,” he admitted.
“But it was also humbling, as they were putting a lot of faith in me to do this,” he said. “Looking back, it was better to have that trial by fire.”
Things started to snowball from there, with the pathologist asking him if he wanted to also try his hand at being an autopsy assistant.
“So, I started to do that on top of my work in funeral service.
Since then, Amato has traveled extensively across the country to facilitate the recovery of brains.
Moving to New Orleans
In June 2025, Amato dusted off his dress shoes and packed up his funeral director suit, moving from Pennsylvania to New Orleans to take a job at a New Orleans funeral home.
“I sold my house in June, and within two days had packed up a U-Haul, and I drove down here,” he said. “It took me 18 hours.”
“New Orleans celebrates death differently,” he said. “They grieve, but there are also funerals where people celebrate through the streets a life well lived. It really brings life and death full circle.”
He set his sights on working in the city after attending the National Funeral Directors Association convention in New Orleans in 2024. He fell in love with his environment almost immediately.
As a result, shortly after returning home, he began trying to find a funeral home that would give him a chance.
He sent an email to a funeral home there and had several virtual meetings with staff members before being invited to talk to the team in person. Ultimately, he was offered a job there as an intern.
Left to right: Jimmy Lucas, owner of Lucas Funeral Homes in Texas; Jenn Parvin, senior vice president and chief customer officer at Batesville; Calvin Amato; and Lisa Baue, the founder of Funeral Women Lead, join Amato as he’s recognized as the recipient of a CANA convention scholarship.
Brain Recovery Work
Individuals can donate their brain to a variety of organizations and institutions that study neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s, CTE, various forms of dementia – “anything like that,” Amato said.
“An individual is signed up as a donor through these brain banks,” he said. “If a person is close to dying, the brain bank will give me a call and ask me if I can stand by and be on call … usually the person dies within 72 hours.”
The “brain bank” will serve as an intermediary of sorts, letting the funeral home or morgue in question know that someone like Amato is on their way. “I’ll also often do a courtesy call and tell them I will be there at this time, and my flight lands at this time,” he said.
We are talking more brains than you may think.
“A growing number of athletes, military personal and even victims of domestic violence donate their brains,” he said.
It’s not uncommon for Amato to hop on a plane and travel thousands of miles away to remove a brain.
“I was just in California to facilitate a recovery there,” he said. “I usually go to the morgue at a hospital or a partnering funeral home where the individual will be … then I take out the brain at that location.”
Not every funeral director is inclined to become a brain recovery specialist, he admits. But more funeral homes should become familiar with the process, he said.
“Where it ties back to funeral service is honoring that life and how do you want to be remembered,” he said. “People can choose this as a last act of service to donate to something larger than themselves – it gives them the chance to help other people with a final act, and it helps with research to one day heal these conditions.”
Given that, funeral homes could easily mention donating your brain or your body to science when working with individuals who are preplanning, he said. “Talk to them about some of the options that are available to them,” he said.
Such a suggestion might resonate, especially when someone has or had a family member with a medical condition such as Alzheimer’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, etc.
“When I take out a brain, there is a lot of work to do as far as restoration, so I am not only taking it out, I am also putting everything back together,” he said.
That’s not always the case, of course, as most brain recovery specialists are not licensed funeral directors (or in Amato’s case, about to become one), so it’s up to the funeral home to do all that restoration work on its own after a brain is removed.
So far, Amato has worked with funeral homes that are supportive of brain recovery work, even though it means being flexible with his schedule.
“If I get a call that morning, I can hopefully be there that evening or the next day,” he said, noting that for it to be usable, someone must have their brain removed within 72 hours of dying.
“The companies that hire me cover my travel – everything except food,” he said. “They will pay for my hotel.”
As an independent contractor, he sets his own rate, which ranges from $2,000 to $3,000 per case – and it’s not unusual for him to recover several brains in a single month, he said.
“I would love to see more of us in funeral service get involved with this,” he said. “It helps give us that insight that everything is interconnected in some way … sometimes, there is tension between organ procurement organizations and funeral homes, and it should be more seamless.”
As to why more funeral directors don’t specialize in brain recovery, they may find it intimidating. On top of that, it’s hard work, he said.
“We are trained to restore after the fact, and there is a lot of work that goes into the restoration,” he said. “So, this may seem tedious or time consuming – you would need to work longer hours, and some of us are burning out,” he said.
Other firms may be reluctant to get involved, as they may be wary of learning more laws and regulations, but as long as you work with a reputable brain bank, there really is no reason for concern, Amato said.
Hospitals, tissue banks, organ procurement companies and funeral homes all could do a better job communicating, Amato said.
“When a funeral home receives a body from a hospital if an autopsy has been done or if a medical examiner has been involved, it can sometimes appear to be a rush job,” he observed. “It makes our lives harder as funeral directors if arteries have been severed in a certain way – or if the work was just done poorly.”
All parties need to work harder at keeping the lines of communication open, he said. “That will help everyone get on the same page and realize that at the end of the day, we are all helping someone somehow – whether it is the funeral home holding a service for the family, whether it is the organ procurement place obtaining organs to donate for transplant or whether it is someone conducting an autopsy to figure out the cause of death and give answers to the family.”
There is one thing that’s been nagging at Amato, however: The lack of standardized training involved in facilitating brain recovery.
“I have been thinking about creating a certification program or something that would give someone working in brain recovery credentials of some sort,” he said. “Because right now, anyone can do it … there should be something in place.”
Despite that lack of training, Amato estimates that only hundreds of people do this type of work – not thousands. For instance, in New Orleans, he’s aware of only one other person who assists with brain recovery.
“The people who do this are usually involved with organ procurement organizations or involved with hospitals in some capacity,” he said. “You have a few licensed funeral directors or people involved in funeral service doing it – and you also have people with no formal background in any of these that are doing this.”
Asked why he didn’t find his way to funeral service sooner, Amato said, “We did not have mortuary schools going to career day at the high school,” he said. “Colleges would visit us, but there was never a funeral home visiting that told us this was an opportunity.” As a result, he ended up doing the traditional four years as an undergraduate.
But he’s thankful to have found the profession – and he hopes more people like him consider it when they decide on a second career.
“You can incorporate so much of what you learned in your first career into funeral service,” he said. “If you are teacher, you can utilize educating and teaching others about what it is we do. If you are an event planner, there is a lot of coordination that goes into what we do.”
It’s also incredibly rewarding.
“I got into this because I find value in helping someone through the worst moment of life,” he said.
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