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Carole was born in Cleveland, OH. As she was growing up she liked her science classes in school and doing experiments on her own. She also liked her classes where she got to learn about her health. She loved it when her family went to visit the natural history museum too. She wanted to study science because she liked the fact that science explains how things work, even the human body. She liked the logic she found in her other science classes. Plus, math and science were much easier for her than writing, English, and history classes. Also, she knew she would not make a good lawyer.

Going to College
When it came time to pick a college, Carole’s parents wanted her to go to a school in Ohio. She looked at some and picked Miami University in Oxford, OH, since it was far enough away from home and yet it had a very good science program. She finished college in 1966. 

Most people who want to do research then go straight on for more school to get their Ph.D. degree. Carole did things differently. She went to work instead of going on for more school. She worked for 6 years as Senior Research Assistant to medical doctor who studied the role of vitamins in health and disease.  When she was ready to go back to school, she stayed close to home this time and went to Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, OH.  She chose CWRU because it has a great program to help train students to do teaching and research. As part of that, Carole would have to learn how to teach classes. So, in her first year, she taught medical students about cells and tissues and how they look when the person is healthy and when the person is sick. From there, she got to teach them what all the bones, nerves, and muscles are and where they are in the body and then do the same for the brain.

It was at CWRU that Carole had her first real class in physiology. It made a lot of sense to her because it took what she had learned in her other science classes and pulled it all together. She really liked that all her classes had labs where she could do experiments and learn about physiology hands-on. For her own research, she studied how the gut absorbs sodium and chloride when everything is normal.

Dr. Liedtke started to look for money to help pay for her research. She got some small grants to help pay for supplies. Then, two years later, she was given a big grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As she kept working in the department, she kept getting promoted. She is now one of the top people in the department.

Dr. Liedtke also continued her own education and took classes while working to get a Masters in Business Administration degree in 1989, as a part-time student.  She brought new skills and knowledge to her lab and other work activities.

As a teacher, she has classes with students just out of high school, students getting their Ph.D. degrees, students getting their degrees to be medical doctors, and other people getting extra research training to help them learn more about physiology.

As a researcher, she studies how the lungs handle fluids, how the lungs change when a person is sick because of their genes, and how to fix the genes so the lungs can work the way they should. For her work, Dr. Liedtke got the APS Cell and Molecular Section’s award for research. She writes up her research for journals and books and gets to go to meetings all over the US and the world to talk about it.

Part of her job also includes being on committees for the department, division, medical school, and college. Dr. Liedtke has been on committees that talked about everything from research to staff to budgets to safety, and a lot more. She also got asked a couple of years ago to start a program to help people training to be researchers. She matches them up with older people in the department so they can get advice and have someone to go to and talk. It’s the first time a program like this has been started at CWRU.

Just this year (2004) she got elected by all of the members of APS to be on the APS Council and help run APS. She is very happy that she got elected and has already started to work in that new job.