Dr. Karen Mittleman

Karen Mittleman is the advisor to the student AWIS chapter at   Rutgers University in New Jersey on doing such a great job.

She received her Ph.D. in Environmental Physiology from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Her work was in developing a model to determine thermosensitivity of heat production in the cold in humans. With this expertise and her previous Master's degree in Exercise Physiology, she traveled to Bethesda, Maryland where she was a National Research Council Research Associate (postdoc) in the Diving Medicine Department at the Naval Medical Research Institute. There she studied ways to improve exercise performance in the cold in the Navy divers which included carbohydrate loading and hypnosis.

In 1990 she became an assistant professor in the Department of Exercise Science and Sport Studies at Rutgers University. She continues to study temperature regulation and performance, however, she has focused over the last few years 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.

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