Teresa Kaye Woodruff

Teresa K. Woodruff, Ph.D. is the MSU Research Foundation Professor, President Emerita of Michigan State University, and past president of the Endocrine Society. She is responsible for many discoveries, three of which have changed our understanding of fundamental reproductive processes and others that led to a new field of medicine. Woodruff and her collaborators discovered the remarkable ‘zinc spark’ which allows an assessment of egg quality in a noninvasive way; she was the first to mature ovarian follicles leading to live births of mice outside the body and fertilizable human eggs; and, she used this technology to develop pathways for cancer patients receiving life-preserving but fertility-threatening treatments to have a family, a field of medicine known as ‘oncofertility’. Additionally, she created the first three-dimensional (3D) printed functional soft tissue, an achievement that she called an ovarian ‘bioprosthetic’ which functioned to produce the first live birth from a printed organ. Her landmark work on hormone signaling in the female reproductive system includes cloning the inhibin and activin subunits, characterizing their transcriptional regulation across ovarian cycles from rodents to humans, and defining the molecular basis of this essential negative feedback pathway. Further, Woodruff used this fundamental knowledge to reconstruct an entire ovarian cycle outside the body in a system now known as EVATAR/Lattice. Woodruff also championed the inclusion of sex as a biological variable in federal grants, opening new vistas of discovery by NIH-funded investigators. In the process, she created new areas of education in the reproductive sciences, from elementary education to materials for high school students and textbooks for clinicians in oncofertility. For this body of educational work, she was awarded the Presidential Award for Mentoring in Science, Technology, and Math by President Obama. Woodruff is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Inventors, and the Guggenheim Foundation.