Feb. 11, 2013 College News - Gretchen Mandel, PhD, a 29-year member of the MCW Department of Medicine faculty, died Sunday, Feb. 10, at the age of 66.
Dr. Mandel was a very successful faculty member. She had both independent peer reviewed funding and was a Co-PI and Co-Investigator on many VA and NIH grants. She made seminal contributions to our understanding of crystal growth mechanisms in crystal-associated arthritic diseases, she used her crystallographic expertise to define the molecular structure requirements for airborne silicon dioxide crystals to be inflammatory and to induce silicosis, and she conducted many epidemiological studies on the prevalence of kidney stone disease in the United States Veteran population.
Many of Dr. Mandel’s publications were with her husband, Dr. Neil Mandel. Their son Ian was also a co-author on some of these publications.
Dr. Gretchen Mandel joined the MCW faculty in 1978 as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1985. Beginning in 1982, she served as Co-Director of the Crystal Identification Center at the Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center, a role in which she served until her retirement in 2009.
Dr. Mandel received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1972, and her BS degree from the University of Southern California, in 1968. She completed two postdoctoral research projects at the California Institute of Technology.