New Investigator

Physiology Overview
Meet a Colleague
Career Resources
Mentoring
Scientific Meetings &
    Societies
Awards Available
Minority Resources
Positions Available
Related Links

Karen Mittleman was born in Newark, New Jersey. She was always very active and played sports (prior to Title IX). That interest in being active outdoors has been a theme throughout her life. During her years in school, she realized that she was drawn more to disciplines that had some sense of order. She liked mathematics and enjoyed physics, but biology was much more interesting because she could relate it better to her life.

Studying Sports 
Karen selected as her undergraduate school Pennsylvania State University because it had a good sports program, it was in a beautiful setting, and it was close, but not too close, to home. As an undergraduate, she studied therapeutic recreation. She received her BSc degree in the winter of 1975. The summer after graduation, Karen got a job as program director at a camp for overweight boys and girls. At the camp she met an exercise physiologist from San Diego who was assessing body composition and fitness in the campers. That was when she realized that she could study how the body responds to exercise as a scientific discipline. She was hooked.

Job and More School
That autumn, even as she started working full time as a recreation therapist at a local hospital, Karen also started classes at San Diego State University, which has an excellent reputation in exercise physiology. She received her Master’s degree from San Diego State University in 1982. She decided to continue on and get a Ph.D. in exercise and environmental physiology so that she could establish her own research program. Again Karen looked for a school that had a good reputation in that field and was in a beautiful place. She selected Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her doctoral research focused on developing a model to determine thermosensitivity of heat production in the cold in humans.

First Position
In 1990 Dr. Mittleman became an assistant professor in the Department of Exercise Science and Sport Studies, where she continued to study temperature regulation and performance. She also did research on the role of the reproductive hormones (estrogen and progesterone) on responses to prolonged exercise and cold. They just completed a study of carbohydrate loading during the follicular (days 1-8) and luteal (days 19-24) phases of the menstrual cycle and its impact on time to exhaustion. They found that, in trained women, CHO loading helped equally well in both phases and that there were no differences in performance between the phases.

Currently, Dr. Mittleman is a Senior Manager in Global Medical Publications at Aventis, a pharmaceutical company located in Bridgewater, NJ. Her primary responsibilities are strategic publications planning for different brands within the company and to ensure that the scientific content in the publications is accurate and presented in a manner that will ensure publication (e.g., clear, organized, fair and balanced, meets the requirements of the journal selected). She also ensures that these publications are approved by key members of the project team, including legal and regulatory personnel. She works with a team to determine the best time and place to publish clinical data for a particular drug therapy.

Advice for New Investigators
Develop collaborative groups where you bring your expertise to complement the work of others. Find out what key elements are necessary for gaining promotion/tenure and focus only on those key elements. Publish from the beginning and write as many grants as you can, making sure you ask your mentors to review them.