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Stefania Fatone was born in Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot-shaped peninsula. Her father was Italian and had met her mother in Australia when he traveled there in the 1970s looking for work. He stayed for more than a year and the two dated but then he returned to Italy. A few years later, her mother spent a year abroad and decided to reconnect with her former boyfriend. “On a jaunt she decided to look up my dad and she never left,” Fatone says. “They ended up having four children in Italy.”
In the early 1980s, the family moved to Melbourne, Australia. Fatone, the oldest of four girls, was six. She grew into a bookworm who loved music and singing. She also loved math and science and was interested in architecture. In the Australian school system, as she approached high school graduation, she had to pick a university study area and take a test to see if she would be offered a spot. Some fields required higher scores than others. Fatone was so worried about flunking the exam that she picked prosthetics and orthotics (P&O), a major that had entry requirements that weren’t exam-based, assuring she would be accepted. She needn’t have worried. “I aced my exams and could have gotten into any course I wanted, but I ended up staying in P&O because it was a balance of two things: biomechanics and sculpting. It was a way to keep the two halves of my brain engaged.”
I ended up staying in P&O because it was a balance of two things: biomechanics and sculpting.
Stefania Fatone, PhD
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Fatone graduated with honors, taking an extra year to write an honors thesis about gait biomechanics in children with a congenital condition called proximal femoral focal deficiency, which causes them to be born with one leg shorter than the other. She went straight into a PhD program at La Trobe University in Melbourne, finishing her degree in four years. When she had trouble finding a research job in Australia, her advisor suggested she look for a post-doctoral fellowship to broaden her experience. As luck would have it, she had recently attended a conference in Dallas where she met Steven Gard, PhD, the current Executive Director of Northwestern University’s Prosthetics-Orthotics Center. He helped create a post-doc position for her and Fatone spent three years as a Northwestern fellow. She then transitioned to a research faculty position at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
Stef is a real joy to work with
Allen Heinemann, PhD
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There she met Allen Heinemann, PhD, the Director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, then known as the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Heinemann had developed OPUS, the only patient-reported outcomes measure for users of prosthetic and orthotic devices. Fatone and Heinemann began working together on a study to demonstrate that using OPUS could improve the quality of care for prosthetic patients. That work led to a series of collaborations between them, including their current project for the U.S. Department of Defense to develop a standardized battery of tests to assess the quality of care for users of ankle-foot orthoses. In addition to her research work, Fatone acts as a mentor to students pursuing master’s degrees in prosthetics and orthotics at Northwestern. “Stef is a real joy to work with,” Heinemann says. “She reads widely, puts facts together and quickly reaches conclusions. If she says she is going to do something, she gets it done.”
Fatone’s busy work life doesn’t leave her much free time but she keeps the artistic part of her brain engaged by singing in the Northwestern University Music Academy Chorus. “I love doing P&O research, engaging with students and bringing research into their education,” Fatone says. “I was lucky to find the thing that makes me happy.”