ACSM’s incoming CEO, Katie Feltman, CAE, is not a new face at the college. Many members of the ACSM family will have worked with her in her prior roles as director of publishing, chief content officer and chief operating officer — and more recently, and fittingly, as interim CEO. But there’s plenty more to know about Feltman, and to that end I sat down with her to chat a bit about her life and her plans moving forward.

Feltman grew up in the Highlands neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, a snapshot of place and time (Feltman is a Gen Xer) where school was in walking distance and kids roved the streets in bicycle gangs. The bike thing would become a recurring leitmotif in Feltman’s life; today she’s an avid cyclist, both on pavement and gravel.

After high school, Feltman enrolled at Hanover College in southern Indiana — across the Ohio River and about 45 minutes from home — where she majored in English and minored in political science. The choice served her well.

“Liberal arts instills a sense of curiosity,” Feltman says. “And I don’t think I ever lost that.”

She initially hoped to pursue a master’s and doctorate in English, but her parents were concerned about the economic prospects of such a trajectory. As a way of meeting them in the middle, and being prudent herself, she decided to work for a few years before returning to academia for the long haul.

But work worked for her, and she ended up in a field she really liked: “Once I found publishing, I never looked back,” she says.

The job was at the academic publisher John Wiley & Sons, better known as simply “Wiley,” and she ended up working in the portion of the house devoted to technology. She took to the role and found in her supervisor, Mary, a vision of what a good leader should be.

“You become a patchwork quilt of everybody you work with and everybody who manages you, and you learn the kind of leader you want to be and the leader you don’t want to be,” Feltman says. “And Mary became my role model for the kind of smart, compassionate, driven, empathetic leader that I wanted to try to emulate.”

But the situation on the ground in the publishing world took a turn for the worse, the process becoming increasingly unfair for authors in ways that Feltman wasn’t comfortable participating in.

“We’d had the disruption of eBooks, but it wasn’t really a disruption,” Feltman says. “But then other disruptions were happening with textbooks; publishers were really starting to scramble to understand their role, and the default was to pass that burden along to the authors.”

Upset by the injustice of it all, she started looking for other job opportunities.

“I mean, these are individuals who, some of whom I had worked with for years,” she says. “I knew them before they were famous. I knew them before they had kids, and I knew them after. And so to have to go to some of our longtime authors and say, ‘We’re changing your financial model, and how you have autonomy over your book. And you’re gonna like it, or you can leave’ — that just didn’t set well with me. I didn’t want to do that anymore.”

But serendipity would soon step in. Feltman was on a plane to California and happened to be seated next to none other than the recruiter ACSM had tasked with finding its next director of publishing. The two got to chatting, and it seemed clear to Feltman that this was the right role for her.

“In some ways, if you will, it was fate,” Feltman says. “He started describing the position to me, and even though I worked in a very specific category area at Wiley — that was technology — I was very active as a cyclist and at the gym. So physical activity — the science behind it, the practice of it — was of personal interest to me. I thought, ‘Wow, it’s a nonprofit. It’s personally interesting and relevant. What do I have to lose?’ And the rest, as they say, is history.”

Feltman became ACSM’s director of publishing in 2012, was promoted to chief content officer in 2017 and became chief operating officer in 2020, holding that role until being tapped as interim CEO in January 2024.

Physical Activity

Feltman’s relationship with physical activity and exercise wasn’t an uncomplicated one, though. Yes, she’d begun cycling at a young age and stayed fit, but in the period before joining ACSM, her life circumstances led to a bit of a slump.

“I had some health issues. My mom wasn’t well,” she says. It led to her gaining quite a bit of weight, at one point passing 300 lbs and living with obesity. “I was prediabetic,” she adds. “I mean, I was having some serious issues.”

But ACSM provided fitness benefits, one of them being a membership at the National Institute for Fitness & Sport, or “NIFS” — of which ACSM staff still occupy a board seat — the gym across the street from ACSM’s former building. Feltman took up the offer and began to get herself back in gear. With the help of ACSM-EP Tony Maloney, she was able not just to exercise but, crucially, adjust some of her living patterns.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say he changed my life,” Feltman says. “He instilled in me the importance of health as the whole person — taking care of yourself, sleeping well, eating right and being mobile.”

She was able to get back into cycling too, eventually serving as a board president for the Central Indiana Bicycling Association. And for the past two years, she’s also been involved with the startup women’s cycling club Momentum Indy Divas.

“The whole idea is to enable a safe cycling atmosphere for any woman, whether she’s never ridden a bike or she’s been a lifetime cyclist and a racer. And so that’s been very fulfilling. And I’ve met a whole new community.”

Feltman’s two primary bikes are a champagne-rosé Cervelo Aspero gravel bike with a “mullet build” (“Which is where they put a mountain biking group set on it to give it more gear range on some of the hills”) and a 12-year-old road bike named Ruby with rim brakes and no electronic shifting. Though she may upgrade soon.

She also has a mountain bike but doesn’t use it much (“It’s a little scary for me”) and formerly had a commuter bike as well, but the gravel bike has now taken on that role.

At ACSM

While ACSM’s director of publishing, Feltman supervised the production of the organization’s worldclass books and journals, negotiating contracts and overseeing the marketing and advertising of the same. She also liaised with the Staff Publications Committee; the Office of Museum, History and Archives; the Ad Hoc Health/Fitness Content Advisory Committee; the Ad Hoc Scientific Content Advisory Committee; and the CEPA Publications Committee.

As chief content officer, or CCO, her purview expanded to include essentially all ACSM messaging, including web and social publications and ACSM’s education arm, heading up not only the publishing and education teams but the marketing wing as well.

When promoted to chief operating officer, or COO, Feltman’s responsibilities shifted more into the conceptual realm. Though she was still in charge of most of the organization’s day-to-day activities and deliverables, she also partnered with ACSM’s previous CEO, Kristin Belleson, to develop long-range goals and visions based on input and instructions from ACSM’s membership. 

After Belleson stepped aside, Feltman was appointed interim CEO in January 2024, giving her a year of practical experience before formally taking on the role of CEO herself.

Plans as CEO

Given her long history with the organization, as well as her recent experience as interim CEO, Feltman has a clear vision for ACSM now and into the future.

“It’s important we don’t lose our multidisciplinary nature,” she says. “I believe that remains our strength and why ACSM attracts the unique members we do. But we’ve got to find a way to talk about ourselves so that our members and exercise professionals understand they’re all part of the same team.” 

She also wants to draw more attention to the role physical activity ought to play in the health care system, a key tenet of ACSM’s signature program Exercise is Medicine^®. Given most of ACSM’s peer organizations focus their content on the needs of a specific career path or discipline, it stands to reason that ACSM should instead leverage its generalist position and science-driven approach to focus on making exercise a go-to preventative and therapeutic intervention.

And since ACSM’s membership and certified professionals represent so many different fields, they can collectively move the needle on this initiative across the entire health care and wellness landscape. Few organizations have as broad a picture of the terrain as ACSM or the unique “bench to bedside to park” expertise across its membership, and we ought to use that multipolar perspective for good.

In more nuts-and-bolts terms, Feltman hopes to continue pressing the gas pedal on ACSM’s fiscal sustainability initiative and strategic plan, particularly as the new website and AMS come online. With financials more regulated and a robust digital infrastructure in place, Feltman believes ACSM will be able to move much more quickly and decisively in support of its strategic plan.

Another complimentary piece she hopes to tackle is getting ACSM plugged back into strategic partnerships with peer organizations that share the similar goals but approach them from different angles and areas of expertise.

“Our partnerships with those key organizations allow us to bring in expertise and content that we may not be able to generate on our own,” she says, adding, in light of the amount of work on much of the ACSM team’s collective plate: “We don’t need to reinvent wheels or be competing with these other groups. We need to be working together with them.”

A Vision

In the 20th century, ACSM’s members pooled their expertise to get climbers to the summit of Mount Everest. It was both a singular and collective vision, drawing expertise from all corners of the organization to create the best possible circumstances for the attempts. The first quarter of the 21st century is already at a close, and ACSM is looking for a new, metaphorical Everest. What might that be?

In part, perhaps, it is rescuing professions from their own silos and providing efficient networks among physicians, researchers and cert pros — all for the benefit of patients, athletes and broad population health. The research is there. The expertise is there. But the people themselves need to be connected.

ACSM is uniquely positioned to do just that.

“We’re the ones able to translate science into practice, advocate for the concept of the health care team and equip the workforce,” Feltman says. “Our members are doing the research, educating future physicians and exercise physiologists, caring for individuals whether elite athletes or someone going in for their yearly checkup, and helping folks get more active in and outside of gyms. If we can truly help people understand how our members are all connected and then provide them with a way to interact with one another, like for referrals or questions, that would be game changing for us. And I think we can do it.”