Despite that early and rewarding exposure to rheumatology, Dr. Gravallese chose pathology as her specialty. In pathology, "there was a deep understanding of pathophysiologic disease mechanisms, and I felt that this was the area in which I might make the greatest impact in studying disease at the basic level. I first did an internship in internal medicine for 1 year at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Once I moved to pathology, I found that there was a keen appreciation for disease mechanism and a huge opportunity for basic investigation into disease mechanism."
But an unmet need for contact with patients continued to pique her. "I desperately missed the contact with patients and the ability to interact closely with other physicians in the treatment of these patients." After her internal medicine internship from 1981 to 1982 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, she undertook a residency in pathology from 1982 to 1984, where she worked with Dr. Joseph Corson, among others. The chief of surgical pathology, Dr. Corson had a special interest in "in the pathologic changes that occurred in the synovium in the rheumatic diseases and had been collecting interesting cases of synovial pathology for his entire career. I was able to work with him in a one-on-one fashion for several months, studying these cases and coming to an understanding of what was and what was not known about the pathogenesis of rheumatic diseases involving the synovium." This was the "eureka" moment that led her to choose rheumatology. From 1984 to 1986, she did 2 more years of internal medicine residency, followed by a rheumatology/immunology fellowship from 1986 to 1988 also at Brigham and Women’s.
Dr. Mittie K. Doyle, a researcher in Dr. Gravallese’s lab in 1994-1996 at the Harvard School of Public Health, also in Boston, noted that her long-time mentor "is actually triple boarded in pathology, internal medicine, and rheumatology."
Dr. Doyle noted that while she worked in Dr. Gravallese’s lab at the Harvard, the focus of her research was a "murine model of Lyme carditis.
"She has made major scientific contributions to the field of rheumatology, specifically in her pursuit to understand the pathogenesis of bone erosion and remodeling in inflammatory arthritis. Along the way, she continues to find the time to mentor young medical students, graduate students, and fellows," said Dr. Doyle, who is director of clinical development in immunology at Johnson & Johnson in Spring House, Penn.
"We met in 1993, when I began my rheumatology fellowship at the Brigham. I was immediately impressed by her superior clinical skills, particularly given her dedication to her innovative basic laboratory work. Ellen’s background in pathology, combined with her clinical expertise, makes her a quintessential translational medicine scientist," Dr. Doyle noted.
But wait, there is another side to Dr. Gravallese. With her husband, Dr. M. Timothy Hresko, she has raised two sons of whom she is immensely proud.
To her young mentors who sometimes lived with Dr. Gravallese’s family while between apartments, the business of parenting while maintaining a cutting-edge research career may have looked easy. But it was not.
"My husband had just left on a trip to a European meeting ... very early the next morning my older son, who was about 7 at the time, woke up short of breath and announced that he was ‘having a heart attack.’ It was croup, and I had to take him urgently to the ER. He was treated, and when we arrived home, I found that our hot-water heater had burst and flooded the basement and our power was out. Just as I had arranged for all of the repairs, my younger son also developed croup."
She survived such back-to-back challenges on the home front with aplomb, even though Dr. Gravallese would be the last person to say so.
Perhaps it is the knowledge that she has survived domestic catastrophes that gave her the pluck needed for her current administrative duties.
Dr. Weinblatt called Dr. Gravallese someone who "remains optimistic about the future of academic medicine." Perhaps, it was that optimism that motivated her to become chief of the rheumatology division at UMass Medical School in 2006, which increased the demands of administration on her time. Since moving to her duties as the chief of rheumatology, "I now focus on the administration of the division but continue to spend much of my time in basic and translational research efforts in RA and bone, and in the study and treatment of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. I see patients with our rheumatology fellows and am involved in the training of medical students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in multiple venues."