Episode 149: Dr. Kate Ackerman Founder & Director, Wu Tsai Female Athlete Program

June 1, 2023
Kathryn (Kate) Ackerman, MD, MPH, FACSM is the Founder and Director of the Wu Tsai Female Athlete Program Boston Children’s Hospital and Biennial International Female Athlete Conference and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She earned her BA from Cornell University, her MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, her MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health, and completed her residency in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her sports medicine fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and endocrinology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. 

She is currently the chair of the US Rowing medical committee and a member of the World Rowing medical commission. Her research focuses on the female athlete health and the various aspects of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S). She has authored/co-authored over 100 articles and book chapters related to sports medicine, endocrinology, rowing, bone health, and female athletes, including position statements with the International Olympic Committee. Athletically, Dr. Ackerman represented the US as a lightweight rower at the World Championships, having taken up rowing as a walk-on at Cornell. She has multiple National Championships titles and still competes with her teammates for life as a masters athlete. Most recently, she has become a member of the national leadership council for the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, a $220mill initiative to improve health and performance globally. Dr. Ackerman is leading the Alliance’s focus on scientific advancements for women.

Kate and host Elizabeth Emery talk about all that she is doing, REDs, as well as menopause (I love she mentions the “laundry list of symptoms”, coming back to sport after pregnancy, and power to weight ratio… I really appreciate that Kate went through some details about cycling up and down in weight for performance and that she stressed this is the kind of thing only elite athletes should be thinking about and definitely not something for teenagers!

Make an appointment with Dr. Kate Ackerman here
Wu Tsai Female Athlete Program Boston Children’s Hospital
Biennial International Female Athlete Conference
Find Kate on Twitter and IG
The Menopause Society
Australian Sports Commission Female Performance & Health Initiative
Hilary Stellingwerff and Trent Stellingwerff

Related episodes include Nancy Clark, Heidi Skolnick, Christine Yu, Michelle Sechser, Tory Mather, Aifric Keogh