Who is Kathy O'Hagan? - Elementary School

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Who is Kathleen O’Hagan?
A Teacher and a Researcher

Kathy was born in Teaneck, NJ and grew up in Midland Park, NJ, a small town in northern NJ. She didn’t think much about science as a child. Most of the “science” she had in school was about rocks, earth, and chemicals, which she really did not like all that much.

Listen to Your Mother
Besides reading a lot and playing sports, Kathy liked to learn about the nature. This was helped by her family going on camping trips and visiting the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Two things in high school pushed her to think about going into science and learning more about how animals and humans work. First, early in high school, she started thinking about what to study in college, like English or the brain and how it works. Her mother told her “You should go into science or computers. It’s the wave of the future for smart girls”. Hearing her Mom say that in the mid-1970s, who did not work and stayed at home, made Kathy really stop and think about maybe studying science. Second, she found she liked her high school biology classes a lot more than chemistry or physics. So she knew she wanted to study biology in college.

Teachers Make a Difference
Kathy went to school at a small college called the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. In her second year there, she took a class on animal physiology. That was when she knew she had found what she wanted to study. In physiology, she saw how she could study both exercise and how organs (like the heart and lungs) work in people and animals that are healthy and sick. Since it was a small school, Kathy had the chance to work with some of the teachers in their labs. This helped her learn about research. In her last year there, one of the teachers let her figure out an experiment and run it on her own. Even though he worked on a different topic, he let Kathy do a study on exercise training using rats, since that was what she wanted to learn about. She finished college in 1983.

Training to Be a Researcher
Kathy knew she wanted to go on to more college but she wanted to go to a school closer to home. She went to Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick. There she learned that exercise is a great tool to use to study how the heart and kidneys work. Learning about exercise and the heart and kidneys ended up being something that helped her as she went out looking for a job. Most people don’t study that many different subjects. It was while she was at that school that she had her first chance to try teaching both in the class and in the lab, which she really liked. She got her Ph.D. degree in 1990.

After that, Dr. O’Hagan moved to Milwaukee, WI where she could get more training in research. There she learned about how the brain and nerves help to control how the blood flows during exercise. This made her interested in learning how blood flow is controlled during exercise, especially in animals that are going to have babies. While she really liked doing only research, Dr. O’Hagan wanted the chance to do both teaching and research. So she decided to look for a job that would let her do both.

Teaching is as Important as Research
Dr. O’Hagan got a job in the Department of Physiology at Midwestern University (MWU) in Downers Grove, IL. MWU is a college that does mostly teaching but also wants its teachers to do research and work with the people that live in the town. Dr. O’Hagan thinks that it was all the teaching she did before that helped her to get this job. A lot of her time is spent teaching and so the college pays her salary. In other schools that are doing more research than teaching, she would have to get her salary from the money she got to pay for her research. Dr. O’Hagan mainly teaches about the kidneys and exercise, although she has to be able to talk about any area of physiology with the students.

Dr. O’Hagan does have a small research lab too. She studies pregnant animals that are exercising and how blood flow is controlled to the babies.

Family and Fun
Dr. O’Hagan has a husband named Kyle Ramsey, who is also a scientist and works at MWU. They have a son Matthew and Kyle’s older children Hannah and Seth. They all like to play sports and spend a lot of time outside. They also like to go to museums in Chicago. They have a large family that lives in the eastern US, so they go to visit them a lot too. Dr. O’Hagan also works in her church, both as a reader during the church service and teaching adults.