About

Kate Fitzpatrick (she/her/hers) is Associate Dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs and Professor of Music Education at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. She holds BME and MA degrees from The Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in music education from Northwestern University, where her dissertation focused on the experiences of instrumental music teachers in the Chicago Public Schools. Before joining U-M in 2008, Fitzpatrick served as an assistant professor of music education and assistant director of bands at the University of Louisville, conducting the Symphonic Band. Her teaching at U-M includes courses on Social Justice in the Arts, Secondary Instrumental Methods, the Art of Music Teaching, Curriculum and Assessment, and advanced research methods. As Associate Dean, she oversees the academic and artistic development of undergraduate students, emphasizing communication, connection, and belonging for student success. Fitzpatrick is an active researcher specializing in equity within arts education, urban music education, culturally responsive pedagogy, gender and motherhood in the academy, and mixed methods research. Her work has been published in numerous scholarly journals and she has authored a book titled 'Urban Music Education: A Practical Guide for Teachers.' She is also co-editing a forthcoming book on motherhood in the music education academy. Fitzpatrick has served on editorial boards, held leadership roles in professional organizations, and is a faculty affiliate to Poverty Solutions at U-M. She received the 2020 Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for promoting equity and social change and was named a fellow of the Big Ten Academic Alliance Academic Leadership Program in 2022. Her background includes directing instrumental music at Northland High School in Ohio and receiving the 2003 God and Country Award for leadership of young people.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Pedagogy
• Environmental health
• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Art
• Bioinformatics
• Physiology
• Aesthetics
• Gender studies
• Biology

Selected publications

• Quantifying “Medical Renal Disease”: A Pediatric Pilot Study Using Ultrasound Radiomics for Differentiating Acute Kidney Injury and Chronic Kidney Disease

  Diagnostics · 2025-08-21 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Background: Differentiating acute kidney injury (AKI) from chronic kidney disease (CKD) in children remains a critical unmet need due to the limitations of current clinical and biochemical markers. Conventional ultrasound lacks the sensitivity to discern subtle parenchymal alterations. This study explores the application of ultrasound radiomics—a novel, non-invasive, and quantitative image analysis method—for distinguishing AKI from CKD in pediatric patients. Methods: In this retrospective cross-sectional pilot study, kidney ultrasound images were obtained from 31 pediatric subjects: 8 with oliguric AKI, 14 with CKD, and 9 healthy controls. Renal parenchyma was manually segmented, and 124 advanced texture features were extracted using the open-source ©PyFeats. Features encompassed multiple categories (e.g., GLCM, GLSZM, WP). Statistical comparisons evaluated intergroup differences. Principal Component Analysis identified the top 10 most informative features, which were used to train supervised machine learning models. Model performance used five-fold cross-validation. Results: Radiomic analysis revealed significant intergroup differences (p < 0.05). CKD cases exhibited increased echogenicity and heterogeneity, particularly in GLCM and GLSZM features, consistent with chronic fibrosis. AKI cases displayed more homogeneous texture, likely reflecting edema or acute inflammation. While echogenicity separated diseased from healthy kidneys, it lacked specificity between AKI and CKD. Among ML models, XGBoost achieved the highest macro-averaged F1 score (0.90), followed closely by SVM and Random Forest, demonstrating strong classification performance. Conclusions: Radiomics-based texture analysis of grayscale ultrasound images effectively differentiated AKI from CKD in this pilot study, offering a promising, non-invasive imaging biomarker for pediatric kidney disease. These preliminary findings justify prospective validation in larger, multicenter cohorts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Modest Blood Pressure Increase with Age in Adults with Down’s Syndrome

  New England Journal of Medicine · 2025-04-03 · 1 citations

  letterOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “I’ve Sat in Your Seat Before”: A Study of the Experiences of Three Black Women Music Educators

  Journal of Research in Music Education · 2024-02-23 · 4 citations

  article

  This descriptive collective case study explored the experiences of three Black women music educators through the framework of community cultural wealth. Analysis of data collected through Seidman’s three-stage phenomenological interview model revealed three themes. The first, “path to teaching,” represented the formative experiences that shaped participants’ development, including a deep level of embodied musical knowledge in multiple genres and the development of resilience. The second, “navigating the academy,” represented the experiences of participants during their collegiate programs, including mentorship and support they had received, perseverance through difficult challenges, and intersections of their experience with existing and often problematic structures in music schools. The final theme, “pedagogical approach,” represented the ways that participants wove aspects of their individual capital and experience into their pedagogical approach, including knowledge of families and community, ethnoracial representation for their students, culturally responsive approaches to pedagogy, and passing along tools for navigational success to their students. Alignment of the data with the framework of community cultural wealth is discussed, emphasizing participants’ prominent uses of both navigational and resistant capital and the development of “Black musical capital.” Implications for music education are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Approaches to developing community: A survey of the perspectives of American female undergraduate prospective band directors

  International Journal of Music Education · 2024-03-05

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Within the field of American secondary school wind band teaching, women have been historically and persistently underrepresented, making it important to consider ways to (1) expand pre-service teachers’ opportunities to engage with successful female band directors, and (2) to explore undergraduate women’s insights into becoming female band directors themselves. The purpose of this survey-based study was to explore the perceptions of American female-identifying collegiate music education majors ( N = 32) regarding the American school-based wind band teaching profession and their experiences within an intensive, one day, community-building event for female band directors. Results of the survey and subsequent analysis revealed a lack of female band director role models under whom participants had studied, a significant positive correlation between participants’ confidence in their ability to succeed in the role and their level of motivation for doing so, and a moderately positive perception of belief in their ability to balance potential future parenthood with their career. Thematic analysis of written responses revealed participants’ gender-specific concerns about entering the band directing profession and their takeaways from the day-long event. Implications are provided, including suggestions for pre-service teacher education, future research, and the development of other such events aimed at developing community for female-identifying band directors.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the effects of visual cue complexity on foot placement accuracy in a targeted stepping task

  Journal of Vision · 2023-08-01

  articleOpen access

  Locomotion requires some degree of cognitive demand and involvement of executive functions including inhibition, updating, and task switching. Secondary tasks that require cognitive demand can impact our walking performance. Online visual information and executive functions coordinate how we navigate and progress safely through our environment, for example, avoiding ice in the winter or stopping at a cross walk. This study explored how inhibition, updating, and task switching are used during a visually guided targeted stepping and obstacle avoidance task. Participants walked along a straight walkway and stepped on or over a colour changing rectangular obstacle (42x20x5cm). The obstacle would change from white to red or green during approach. Instructions given to the participant coupled with the light change would result in a specific response: Preliminary instructions (green=on, red=over); Switched Instructions (green=over, red=on). It was expected that the switched instructions would pose an increased cognitive demand and subsequently result in a decrease in performance. The following gait measures were analyzed 1) Foot placement accuracy 2) maximum head tilt angle 3) Center of mass (COM) velocity. To date, our preliminary data for young adults (N=6) have shown that foot placement was most accurate in medial lateral direction (<1cm error) compared to anterior-posterior (AP). In the AP direction, foot placement accuracy was highest for the preliminary instructions with green lights (on) and least accurate in the switched instructions with green lights (over). This suggests that with increased cognitive demand, there is a decrease in motor accuracy. Data analyses and collection are ongoing. These findings will help further our understanding about the impact of complex visual cues on targeted stepping and obstacle avoidance tasks.

  PublisherDOI

• Motherhood in the Music Academy

  Journal of Research in Music Education · 2023 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Gender studies

  This study explored the perceptions of music professors as to their experiences navigating both the academy and motherhood. We utilized a multiple critical case study approach to understand the experiences of six participants, two of each representing early-career (assistant professors), midcareer (associate professors), and late-career (full professors) female-identifying music faculty with children. Analysis of the data revealed three themes. The first, living within two worlds, represented participants’ lived experiences of parenthood and their careers as faculty within the music academy, highlighting participants’ use of “drastic measures to make it all work.” The second theme, motherhood and gender equity, represented the participants’ experiences of motherhood as a gendered phenomenon, including navigating microaggressions and discrimination in the workplace. The final theme, navigating the academic world: structures and people, represented participants’ experiences related to tenure and promotion, the lack of support they frequently perceived from academic colleagues, and the financial ramifications of their dual positionality. Recommendations for further research and suggestions for practice are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Mechanisms of the intestinal and urinary microbiome in kidney stone disease

  Nature Reviews Urology · 2022 · 78 citations

  • Medicine
  • Physiology
  • Bioinformatics
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Finding the Other Half of Me”: Culture-Based Approaches to Music Education in Hawaiʻi

  Journal of Research in Music Education · 2021 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Pedagogy

  The purpose of this study was to examine how Hawaiian music teachers describe their uses of Hawaiian culture–based educational approaches in the music classroom. The theoretical lens of culture-based education framed the study in that it emphasizes increased attention to questions of cultural restoration within Indigenous communities. A collective descriptive case-study design was used to illuminate the complexities and particularities of the phenomenon of Hawaiian culture–based education utilized by four participant music teachers in their own particular contexts. Data collection included three interviews with each teacher participant, a student focus group interview at each school site, and field notes taken from in-person observations of each music classroom. Analysis revealed four themes central to the participants’ experiences, including teachers’ diverse approaches to culture-based education, their sources of cultural understanding, how they addressed or navigated challenges, and the multiple layers of meaning that they and their students derived from these culture-based approaches. Particularly compelling were findings related to each teacher’s identity and relationship to Hawaiian culture, complicated issues of authenticity related to performing and teaching Hawaiian music, and the centrality of positive relationships to culture-based approaches.

  PublisherDOI

• Nursing professional governance

  Nursing Management · 2019-09-27 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Dragoon, Nicole BSN, RN, OCN; Nadeau, Michelle BSN, RN, CCRN; Toolin, Susan MSN, RN, CCRN; Gagne, Margaret MSN, RN; FitzPatrick, Kate DNP, RN, ACNP, NEA-BC, FAAN Author Information

  PublisherDOI

• Afterword: The Present and Future of Transmedia Practices—A Conversation

  2018-10-09 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  With the intent of both echoing and elaborating on the themes, sentiments, and arguments explored throughout this entire volume, this final chapter—a conversational interview between the editors and four transmedia practitioners, each based in a different media sector in the United Kingdom—uses as its jumping-off point the idea that transmediality continues to mean different things to different people in different ways, albeit with some overarching conceptual overlaps that continue to make the term useful. As has been articulated throughout this book, the creative strategies employed to produce content across multiple media platforms are largely informed and characterized by the contexts in which they operate. This Afterword, then, while reiterating this same importance of contexts of specificity, will build on the work of the book’s Introduction and all of its subsequent chapters by further teasing out the overarching industries, arts, practices, and cultures of what transmedia really is and where it operates today via the views of four well-placed practitioners working across four creative industries.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Debra Arnow

  Children's Hospital & Medical Center

  16 shared

• Teri Pipe

  16 shared

• Jeffrey N. Doucette

  16 shared

• Amy Cotton

  16 shared

• Erin Hansen

  2 shared

• Dirk Lange

  University of British Columbia

  2 shared

• Bridget Mary Sweet

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2 shared

• Ed Duling

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2020 Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for Excellence in Promo…