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Dr. Melissa
Knothe Tate
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DR. MELISSA L. KNOTHE TATE TO DEVELOP A NEW MUSCULOSKELETAL MECHANOBIOLOGY RESEARCH PROGRAM AT CASE BME
The Department of Biomedical Engineering is excited to appoint Dr. Melissa Knothe Tate as Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Knothe Tate joined the faculty as the first joint Associate Professor of Biomedical and Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering in July 2004.
Professor Melissa Knothe Tate will have her teaching debut in Biomedical Engineering this Spring Semester, when she teaches a new version of the Cell and Tissue Engineering course EBME 408. She is a biologist, mechanical engineer and biomedical engineer by training, and her career path has been equally diverse. She started as an undergraduate at Stanford University, where she completed a dual degree in Biological Sciences and Mechanical Engineering. Her undergraduate research experience in the laboratory of Professor Dennis Carter, a pioneer in bone mechanobiology, had a profound influence on her further career trajectory. Dr. Knothe Tate has focused her research on the field of mechanobiology ever since! Interestingly, many of current leaders in the field were the graduate students with whom she worked as an undergraduate and have remained close colleagues and friends. Dr. Knothe Tate's undergraduate research experiences also shaped her philosophy that students need to get into the lab as soon as possible in their educational career in order to realize their full potential. Having completed her dual B.S., Dr. Knothe Tate decided to forgo medical school and took a year off to explore the world while conducting research in Europe. She deferred her graduate studies at Stanford and started studying mechanical and biochemical cues for cellular remodeling of bone at the renowned AO Research Institute in Davos, Switzerland. In between experiments, Dr. Knothe Tate took off periodically to trek through the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, to bicycle through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia when "the wall" came down, and to scuba dive and snorkel through the Maldive Islands. She compares her interest in science to her "Wanderlust" in the world: just as she can "lose herself", peering through the microscope to understand the inner workings and behavior of bone cells, she loves to "lose herself" in unknown cultures and climates, discovering unknown places and peoples. She integrates this love of diversity and change in her research program, collaborating with colleagues from all over the world, building an internationally and culturally diverse research team, and "commuting" between departments in order to integrate across different disciplines at Case.
In graduate school, Dr. Knothe Tate ended up transferring from Stanford to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where she first took all of the fundamental engineering examinations (in German) prior to continuing her doctoral studies. Although many students would have forgone this difficult path, Dr. Knothe Tate deepened her understanding of fluid mechanics and numerical methods while studying for and completing her Swiss Diploma exams. During her studies, Dr. Knothe Tate had the opportunity to spearhead her own research program, writing a Swiss National Science Foundation grant that was funded prior to completion of her doctoral degree. Dr. Knothe Tate was awarded the Fischer Prize for most outstanding dissertation at the ETH in 1997. She continued her research program after finishing her degree and headed the Musculoskeletal Mechanobiology Experimental Group at the AO Institute in Davos and the Computational Group at the ETH in Zurich. Dr. Knothe Tate lived in the Canton Bern during that time and commuted up to five hours per day in order to mentor students in both of her labs.
In 1998, Dr. Knothe Tate gave birth to her daughter, Lillian; she and her orthopaedic surgeon husband, Ulf Knothe, decided to take a year off for a sabbatical in the United States. Dr. Knothe Tate was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation to spend the year 2000 as a Visiting Professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan. Her husband used the opportunity to pursue a fellowship with one of the world's most renowned musculoskeletal tumor specialists, Dr. Dempsey S. Springfield at Mt. Sinai's Dept. of Orthopaedic Surgery.
Although she and her husband had planned to return to wonderful opportunities in Switzerland after their "New York year", Dr. Joseph Iannotti from the Cleveland Clinic had other ideas, and invited them to join the new Orthopaedic Research Center and Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. "We knew it was a risk to give up the opportunities in Switzerland for a totally new, ´unknown´ opportunity in Cleveland, but we also knew that this may be our last chance to ´pick up our stakes and start anew´". So, the Knothe Tate family had their household effects shipped over from Switzerland and moved to Cleveland in February 2001. Dr. Knothe Tate was on the staff of the Cleveland Clinic for three and a half years. She taught lectures in the tissue engineering and materials sequence at Case's Department of Biomedical Engineering during that time and became keenly aware that she missed the university environment, so she decided to try to "flip" her appointments, moving her "home research base" to the university while having her secondary appointment at the Clinic. Fortunately for her, Case was recruiting new faculty and she was offered "the perfect opportunity" to combine her interests in fundamental engineering with her focus on figuring out how and why cells respond to different biochemical and mechanical stimuli. She works to exploit this knowledge to engineer tissues and to develop new treatments for musculoskeletal diseases.
While Dr. Knothe Tate has maintained focus on the inner workings of cells and tissues, her research and recreational pursuits have taken her around the world. Nonetheless, she is delighted to be in Cleveland, "one of the rare places in the world offering world class university and medical centers within five minutes of affordable, historic housing, good schools and the cultural treasures of University Circle – plus, the airport is just 20 minutes away, making quick connections with the rest of the world a convenient reality!"
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