When he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center in Providence from 1999 to 2001, one of John Jakicic’s goals was to reduce the wash of red ink on his papers after they were reviewed by his supervisor, Rena Wing.
Now a professor and a department chairman at the University of Pittsburgh, Jakicic eventually did get his papers back with little or no red ink. And he says that Wing, the red-ink purveyor, is the reason for much of his success in the field of behavioral weight control and health.
“What she required of me was the best possible work that I could give,” Jakicic said of Wing. “And when I felt like I had given all I could she asked for a little more. Then I gave her more than I realized I could. We always knew we wanted to make Rena proud.”
Wing, 64, holds a Ph.D. in social relations, is a professor of psychiatry and human behavior, and serves as director of Weight Control and the Diabetes Research Center at The Miriam Hospital and the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University. She is being recognized as an outstanding mentor to other businesswomen in this year’s Business Women awards program.
Wing is internationally known for her research on behavioral weight control. She has worked with obese patients with a variety of illnesses, most notably diabetes, and has studied strategies to help people lose weight, keep it off, and to thereby reduce their health risks. She is chairman of Look Ahead, an ongoing study of the effect on the cardiovascular health of more than 300 patients with Type 2 diabetes.
She maintains the National Weight Control Registry, which tracks more than 6,000 people who successfully maintained significant weight loss, with the goal of learning from their successes to help others struggling with obesity and weight loss.
And Wing played a significant role in crafting the nationwide Diabetes Prevention Program, which, beginning in the 1990s, examined the effects of diet, exercise and medication in reducing new cases of diabetes. Results from that program now guide treatment for patients with pre-diabetes.
Studies of weight control and its effect on health problems like diabetes have urgent, real-world implications. At present, 65 percent of people with Type 2 diabetes die from some sort of cardiovascular disease. Scientists know that obesity aggravates diabetes and other problems, and they even know how to help people take weight off. The nagging mystery is how to help patients keep the weight off.
Deborah Tate, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a former post-doctoral student under Wing’s tutelage, said of herself and other post-docs, “Rena becomes the voice in your head and the standard to which you aspire.
“She is very dynamic and hard-working, and she expects similar things from the people she works with,” Tate said. “She expects you to do good science and to be exact. And she also expects people to think creatively about the problem and to come up with innovative solutions.”
Several people who have worked with Wing or under her supervision said she has made a mark in their field of behavioral weight loss in part by training successive generations of scientists and researchers who have set down their roots in institutions elsewhere in the United States.
“Rena is wonderful at trying to develop and promote more junior people who come to work with her,” said Jeanne McCaffery, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at The Miriam Hospital and Brown medical school. “She challenges people to do their best work, their most innovative work, and to become an independent investigator. Rena has excelled in bringing on people who are transitioning to faculty level and becoming independent researchers.”
Jakicic, from Pittsburgh, agreed, saying that he keeps Wing in mind as a model when he now supervises post-docs of his own. “Now, I am trying to pay it forward,” he said.
He also noted that Wing was one of the first women in the field, and that her work was pioneering, to the point of butting up against resistance from colleagues at times. During the early days of the Diabetes Prevention Program, Jakicic said, Wing insisted that diet and exercise needed to be included as major factors in the program, at a time when the focus was on medication. “She insisted on it because this is something she believes in,” Jakicic said.
Wing said mentoring was a natural development in her career.
“You reach a point in your own career that you realize your major job is to help impart the skills and the excitement for the work, and to help others develop their own careers,” Wing said. “I get as much thrill out of their succeeding as I do from my own successes.”
Wing recruits budding scientists from a variety of disciplines, such as exercise physiology, clinical psychology and neural psychology, among others. She said one of her goals is to help post-docs make a useful marriage of the topics they are interested in, combined with the study of obesity and illness. “I’m not trying to make them all the same as me,” she noted.
Wing said her role as mentor extends into the personal well-being of the people who work for her. “I have a concern for each of these young faculty members as individuals,” Wing said. “Several have had pregnancies or health problems while they have worked for me. So, I am also mentoring them in life skills.”
As a wife, mother and grandmother, Wing said her history of piloting her life through the common home versus career tradeoffs has probably been helpful to some of the younger women she has served as mentor.
She said when she sees work or hears presentations by scientists and professors who once worked for her, “I feel very proud. I feel like they are part of my family.” •
