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Who is Karen Mittleman?
From Exercise Researcher to Writer
Karen Mittleman was born in Newark, New Jersey. She was
always very active and played sports. During school, she saw that the subjects
she liked were the ones that had some kind of order to them. She liked math and
physics, but biology was better because she could relate it to her life.
Studying Sports
When it came time for college, Karen went to Pennsylvania
State University because it had a good sports program, it was in a pretty place,
and it was close, but not too close, to home. She studied how to use sports as a
way to help people get strong again after being sick. She finished college in
the winter of 1975. The next summer she worked at a camp for overweight boys and
girls. At the camp Karen met a scientist from San Diego who studied exercise
physiology. He was at the camp to do a study on how much body fat a boy or girl
had compared with how fit they were. That was when she first knew that she could
have a career of learning how the body reacts to exercise. She was hooked.
Job and Back to School
That fall Karen started a new job as a local hospital where
she used sports and recreation to help people get better after they had been
sick. At the same time, she also started taking classes in exercise physiology
at San Diego State University, which is a really good school for that. She got
her Master’s degree from San Diego State University in 1982. Karen liked
research so much that she wanted to go on and get a Ph.D. in exercise physiology
so that she could do her own research. She again looked for a school that was
known to be good in that area and that was in a pretty place. She chose Simon
Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. There she worked on
finding a way to figure out how people responded differently to cold by
producing heat or changing the blood flow in their skin to stop heat loss.
Diving Research
After she graduated in 1987, Dr. Mittleman wanted more
research experience so she moved to Bethesda, MD to work at the Naval Medical
Research Institute in the Diving Medicine Department. During the 1.5 years she
was there, she studied ways to improve how long and how well the Navy divers
could exercise in cold water. She looked at both having the divers eat lots of
carbohydrates (like pasta and bread) before diving and even tried hypnosis
(putting them into a type of sleep to make them feel warmer) before working in
cold water.
Teaching and Research
In 1990 Dr. Mittleman got a job as a teacher and researcher
in the Department of Exercise Science and Sport Studies at Rutgers University,
in New Brunswick, NJ, where she kept on with her studies on how the body
controls its temperature to make sure it can work well during exercise and not
get too hot. She also did research on what role the female hormones have in the
body when a woman is exercising for a long time and in the cold.
Changing Careers
After working at Rutgers for 7 years, Dr. Mittleman wanted
to try something different than teaching and research. She decided to become a
science writer to help people better understand health-related research and
because she like writing. She started out working for a medical communications
company in Princeton, NJ. There she wrote up the results from research that was
done by drug companies who were testing new drugs. After 6 years of doing that,
Dr. Mittleman decided to take a new job with a drug company as a medical
publications manager. She did that because in a big drug company she would have
other career options for her future than she would at a small company.
Currently, Dr. Mittleman is a Senior Manager in Global
Medical Publications at Aventis, a drug company in Bridgewater, NJ. Her main
jobs are to work with a team to come up with where to print the results of
studies on new drugs, to make sure that what is sent out to be approved for
printing is correct and ready for printing. She also has to make sure that all
the researchers, lawyers, and others approve the papers that are written.
For Fun
Dr. Mittleman still loves being outdoors and playing
sports, just like when she was little. She likes to scuba dive, hike, and play
softball. |
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