Wendie Cohick, Vice Provost and Vice Chancellor for Research, Rutgers-New Brunswick.
Wendie Cohick, Vice Provost and Vice Chancellor for Research, Rutgers-New Brunswick and faculty in the Department of Animal Sciences, is one of eight Rutgers faculty named to the 2026 class of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellows. Cohick and her Rutgers colleagues were among the 500 scientists, engineers and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines ranging from research, teaching and technology to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public. Individuals are elected annually in a tradition dating back to 1874.
Wendie Cohick’s scientific life began in an agricultural research lab at Cornell University, where, as an undergraduate studying animal science, she learned to sit with questions that did not yet have answers.
Working with dairy cows, she sensed that beneath visible physiology lay an unseen network of signals.
“How does the body know to divert nutrients to the fetus or to the mammary gland to make milk?” she recalled wondering. “What are the long-term signals that control how the body allocates energy?”
The search led her into endocrinology and into the emerging field of insulin-like growth factors, or IGFs. The literature was sparse, the players unknown. The field resembled a half-finished puzzle, with only a few edge pieces turned face up and most of the picture obscured. In 1996, Cohick arrived at Rutgers University’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences as an assistant professor. Studying the cells in the mammary gland that make milk, she began determining how the pieces connected. IGF-1 proved central to normal growth and survival, but a complex system of binding proteins was needed to keep its activity in check.
Her lab uncovered surprises. One binding protein long thought to dampen IGF-1 instead amplified its effects, strengthening the hormone’s drive toward cell growth. The finding reinforced a principle that guided her work.
“If you don’t understand the mechanism, you can’t know whether targeting it will ultimately help patients or make things worse,” she said.
Over time, the biological pathways she traced in cows revealed patterns that held in humans, including the intersection, or “crosstalk,” of hormone systems such as IGF and estrogen. Since alcohol consumption, a risk factor for breast cancer, increases estrogen, Cohick wondered if IGF-1 could also be involved. This shaped her studies of breast cancer and what she calls “the developmental window,” when early exposures like alcohol may influence lifelong risk.
As her leadership expanded at Rutgers, her instinct remained constant: Understand how the pieces lock together. Whether guiding a laboratory or a universitywide research agenda, she urges scientists to look beneath the surface, to understand not just what happens, but why. Today she envisions more precise, molecularly-guided cancer treatments.
“What happens inside cells may be invisible to us, but it holds the key to giving patients better futures,” she said.
AAAS, the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its Science family of journals, announced the newest members of the class of fellows on March 26. It is among the most distinctive honors within the scientific community.
Wendie Cohick’s profile was written by Kitta Macpherson. For complete coverage of the 8 Rutgers faculty named to the 2026 class of AAAS fellows, read more in Rutgers Today.