Rackham Graduate School - University of Michigan

A L U M N I P R O F I L E SPhoto by Ron MiduraResearch is a Team Sport8Research, says Kathe Derwin,is a team sport.She’s well acquainted withboth. An avid participant of bothhigh school and collegiate sports,Derwin spent her tenure as a U-Mbioengineering graduate student asa research assistant under the mentorshipof Dr. Lou Soslowsky inProfessor Steve Goldstein’sOrthopaedic Research Laboratories.A bioengineering pioneer and“an impact player” in the fieldglobally, Goldstein “built up a labwith a lot of different peoplearound,” says Derwin, who receivedher doctorate in 1998. “We interactedextensively with clinicians, scientists,and engineers. He set up amodel for bridging disciplines, andall the people he’s trained havegone on to replicate that.”Including Derwin, who is busysetting up her own lab at theCleveland Clinic Foundation toresearch how mechanical factorsinfluence the injuries, healing,remodeling, and aging of tendonsand ligaments. “I’m interested inbasic questions,” says Derwin, “butin concert with those, I would liketo do some clinical projects withour orthopaedic surgeons here.” Herinterest in such work demonstratesDerwin’s belief that “with so muchto study in this field, it will taketeams of people talking to eachother across disciplines to evenbegin to cover it all.”With an undergraduate degree inmechanical engineering from theUniversity of Massachusetts-Amherst, she briefly consideredmedical school before choosing adifferent spot on the healing artscontinuum: improving the tools thatdoctors can use to help theirpatients.What she wants to avoid, shesays, is “getting so focused on ourwork in the lab that I forget we canget a lot of valuable information outof patients. There are things thatcan be investigated, on the applicationend, right along. When you’reinvestigating basic questions, youhave the attitude that the sky’s thelimit and we just need to knowinformation, but ultimately it has tobe in an applicable form. In the