Postdoctoral fellow
Kaja is a Novo Nordisk Foundation Postdoc Fellow in the Cohen Lab with a dual-affiliation in New York and Denmark (Metabolism Center, Copenhagen University). She received her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Aberdeen (UK) where she studied neuronal links between cognitive aging and diabetes. Kaja is interested in the endocrine function of brown fat and the inter-organ cross talk it mediates to control insulin sensitivity during normal physiology and pathophysiology such as obesity and diabetes. Her work is focused on the discovery of blood biomarkers of brown fat both in mice and human subjects exposed to environmental cold, as well as development of novel chemical proteomic tools to label, trace and enrich secreted factors in a
cell-type selective manner in order to better understand the impact of brown fat on metabolic health.
Areas of Interest/Expertise:
Fellowships, awards, or major grants:
Selected publications:
- Plucińska K, Wayne CR, Sanford H, Mathew B, Ropek N, Adaniya SM, Model C, Gómez-Banoy N, Morozova K, Cao X, Friedman JM, Loh KH, Cohen P, Vinogradova EV. Cell-type-specific proximity labeling of organ secretomes reveals energy balance-dependent proteomic remodeling. Cell Rep. 2026;45(6):117507. doi:10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117507
- Plucińska K, Chen ZZ, Xiang R, Zaman S, Yan L, Hurson C, Peterson C, Fredrickson K, Farrell L, Walker J, Kars ME, Tiwari G, Pourquie O, Itan Y, Carroll TS, Chen KY, Cypess AM, Gerszten RE, Cohen P. Acute cold exposure in humans shifts the circulating proteome to a cardioprotective and anti-aging profile. bioRxiv. 2025 Jul 4:2025.06.30.662436. doi:10.1101/2025.06.30.662436